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

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

Telephone and telegraph were better means of communication than the holy man's telepathy

Human beings are not efficiently designed for a capitalist system of production.

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

He[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.

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.