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

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.

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.

In a world of limited resources, our wealth is at the expense of the poor. To put it simply, if we have it, others cannot.

Focus on keeping faith and growing your roots of light so strong and deep that no one, not even yourself, can make you believe something about yourself that is not good for your soul.

Since there are thousands of fairy tales, one may safely guess that there are probably equal numbers where the courage and determination of females rescue males, and vice versa.

I also understand that you have to lie to yourself to survive in a bad marriage, you have to delude yourself if you want to carry on in this life.

I was born modest not all over but in spots.

The ribbons! The wrappings! The tags! And the tinsel! The trimmings! The trappings!

No one gets to start where they left off; it just doesn't work that way.

Equality is not a concept. It's not something we should be striving for. It's a necessity. Equality is like gravity. We need it to stand on this earth as men and women.

I'm gonna ask you one more time, will you or will you not go out with me? I think my hand's slipping.

It should be remembered that men of courage, integrity, and principle can stand up to Big Brother and resist the headlong march into economic tyranny.