Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market.

- Eric Hobsbawm

N. S. Khrushchev established his supremacy in the U.S.S.R. after post-Stalinist alarums and excursions (1958-64). This admirable rough diamond, a bel…

- Eric Hobsbawm

The paradox of communism in power was that it was conservative.

- Eric Hobsbawm

Many years later, another Marxian rephrased this as the choice between socialism and barbarity. Which of these will prevail is a question which the t…

- Eric Hobsbawm

The only certain thing about the future is that it will surprise even those who have seen furthest into it.

- Eric Hobsbawm

(Carmine Crocco) A farm-labourer and cowherd, had joined the Bourbon army, killed a comrade in a brawl, deserted and lived as an outlaw for ten years…

- Eric Hobsbawm

Utopianism is probably a necessary social device for generating the superhuman efforts without which no major revolution is achieved.

- Eric Hobsbawm

Impotence therefore faces both those who believe in what amounts to a pure, stateless, market capitalism, a sort of international bourgeois anarchism…

- Eric Hobsbawm

The greatest cruelties of our century have been the impersonal cruelties of remote decision, of system and routine, especially when they could be jus…

- Eric Hobsbawm