The paradox of communism in power was that it was conservative.

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.

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.

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

It is one of the ironies of this strange century that the most lasting results of the October revolution, whose object was the global overthrow of capitalism, was to save its antagonist, both in war and in peace - that is to say, by providing it with the incentive, fear, to reform itself after the Second World War, and, by establishing the popularity of economic planning, furnishing it with some of the procedures for its reform

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