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.

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 believer in reform and peaceful coexistence, who incidentally emptied Stalin's concentration camps, dominated the international scene in the next few years. He was also perhaps the only peasant boy ever to rule a major state

The most lasting and universal consequence of the French revolution is the metric system

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.

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

It is a melancholy illusion of those who write books and articles that the printed word survives. Alas, it rarely does.