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.

It seems that American patriotism measures itself against an outcast group. The right Americans are the right Americans because they're not like the wrong Americans, who are not really Americans.

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

The greatest cruelties of our century have been the impersonal cruelties of remote decision, of system and routine, especially when they could be justified as regrettable operational necessity.

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 imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people.

Many years later, another Marxian rephrased this as the choice between socialism and barbarity. Which of these will prevail is a question which the twenty-first century must be left to answer.