All professionals, whether physicists, economists or musicians, live by and for peer judgment, even when they are being paid by people who cannot tell the difference.
Eric HobsbawmThere 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.
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 HobsbawmThe 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.
Eric Hobsbawm