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.

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.

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.

Our archives are treasure troves - a testament to many lives lived and the complexity of the way we move forward. They contain clues to the real concerns of day-to-day life that bring the past alive.

Great charismatic leaders don't just say what voters want to hear

As long as she was falling in love with me, I might as well start making her promises I didn't intend to keep.

I'm very thoughtful, and when I make a decision I usually stick to it.

Once I became a professional, maybe 19 or 20, I really started to try to figure out who I was, as a woman and as an individual.

To say 'well done'to any bit of good work is to take hold of the powers which have made the effort and strengthen them beyond our knowledge.

I don't finish every story, but I probably write and send out three out of five of them.

You better be able to defend it after the attack - so don't stretch it. In other words, if the guy's guilty of A and B, don't make him guilty of A, B, and C. That's what a lot of people do.

The love of husband and wife is the force that welds society together.

Will is wish, and liberty is power.