The most lasting and universal consequence of the French revolution is the metric system

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.

May the grace of God keep you strong through every difficulty.

Chance favours the prepared mind.

There has been grave error. I do not mean so much error of doctrine as error of emphasis.

As far as possible, join faith to reason.

Successful people save in prosperous times so they have a financial cushion in times of recession.

Customer will create most value for you at point he thinks you're creating most value for him.

The greater amount of truth is impulsively uttered; thus the greater amount is spoken, not written.

Because artists can be extremely eccentric and insane, and unfortunately, the people they hurt the most are the people that are closest to them.

Most of us are not leaders today because, in our hearts we don't believe that is who we are.

Punish the deed, not the breed.