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.

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.

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

The only certain thing about the future is that it will surprise even those who have seen furthest into it.

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

Xenophobia looks like becoming the mass ideology of the 20th-century fin-de-siecle.

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.

No serious historian of nations and nationalism can be a committed political nationalist... Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so.

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.

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

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

I do not know how it all started, but I would certainly play my part in how it all ends.

Oh Lord, make us ableTo eat all that's on this table, And if there's some we haven't gotBring it to us while it's hot

Familiarity has a way of filing the sharp edges off our feelings for other people. You'll see.

The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose.

We love to chew the cud of a foregone vision; to collect the scattered rays of a brighter phantasm, or act over again, with firmer nerves, the sadder nocturnal tragedies.

I like chatting with people. If people ask me a direct question, I give them a direct answer and I feel I've always done that with the press.

Babies, we are told, are the latest news from heaven.

I need to go where people are serious about acting.

I don't really feel much more confident than I did the last couple years. I've always felt like I have a pretty good knuckleball. I worked hard to do that.?