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.

Many years later, another Marxian rephrased this as the choice between socialism and barbarity. Which of these will prevail is a question which the twenty-first century must be left to answer.

Simplicity saves strength.

You are creating through your choices, even now. Choose wisely.

Self-confidence is not a fixed way of being. People are not born with certain levels of self-confidence, it can be acquired, and it can be lost.

For a lot of people, the weekly paycheck is "take-home pay" because home is the only place they can afford to go with it.

Anything you have to acquire a taste for was not meant to be eaten.

I think success is being exactly who God called us to be and fighting to your death to live that out.

The kinds of errors that cause plane crashes are invariably errors of teamwork and communication.

I've got a bit of Scottish Blood... On my kitchen knife!!

Sir, you have but two topics, yourself and me. I am sick of both.

The creative adult is the child who has survived.