He[Napoleon] had destroyed only one thing: the Jacobin Revolution, the dream of equality, liberty and fraternity, and of the people rising in its majesty to shake off oppression. It was a more powerful myth than his, for after his fall it was this, and not his memory, which inspired the revolutions of the nineteenth century, even in his own country.

There is not much that even the most socially responsible scientists can do as individuals, or even as a group, about the social consequences of their activities.

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

Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it.

Human beings are not efficiently designed for a capitalist system of production.

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

As the global expansion of Indian and Chinese restaurants suggests, xenophobia is directed against foreign people, not foreign cultural imports.