Civil Society is a cluster of institutions and associations strong enough to prevent tyranny, but which are, none the less, entered and left freely, rather than imposed by birth or sustained by awesome ritual. You can join the Labour Party without slaughtering a sheep.

Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness; it invents nations where they do not exist.

People are even more reluctant to admit that man explains nothing, than they were to admit that God explains nothing.

The production of obscurity in Paris compares to the production of motor cars in Detroit in the great period of American industry.

It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round.

Nowledge which... transcends the bounds, the prejudices and prejudgements of any one society and culture is not an illusion but, on the contrary, a glorious and luminous reality. Just how it was achieved remains subject to debate.

Ideas, and even the detection of errors, require more than care and caution.