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

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.

The artist says to the cosmos: All I ask is infinite love-is that so very wrong? And the cosmos doesn't even bother to respond.

To wit, existence is communication and communication is existence.

When billionaire car dealers or manufacturers pay for ambassadorships, at least they pay with money earned by selling something of value.

Whatever labels may be attached to the fifteen charges brought against me, they all arise from my having been a member of the Communist Party and from my activities as a member.

Life will teach you, but you have to live long enough to get those lessons.

I think it's really great to be able to stick with a character for a long period of time. It's not like you have one shot, and that's it.

My belief is that most people are conservative. They just haven't been asked yet.

Changing the world, one exclamation point at a time.

I'm finding my way, and I make mistakes.

Now, for my younger viewers out there, a book is something we used to have before the internet. It’s sort of a blog for people with attention spans.