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.
Eric HobsbawmThe only certain thing about the future is that it will surprise even those who have seen furthest into it.
Eric HobsbawmMany 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.
Eric HobsbawmIt is a melancholy illusion of those who write books and articles that the printed word survives. Alas, it rarely does.
Eric HobsbawmNations 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.
Eric HobsbawmHe[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.
Eric Hobsbawm