Utopianism is probably a necessary social device for generating the superhuman efforts without which no major revolution is achieved.

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.

-Хүү минь, чи надад ямар ч өргүй гэж бодож явах эрхийг би чамд олголоо.

The most exquisite pleasure in the practice of medicine comes from nudging a layman in the direction of terror, then bringing him back to safety again.

The love you give away is the love you keep.

You can dissect a joke just as you can a frog. But it tends to die on you.

Isn't it true that every aristocrat wants to die?

It is the service we are not obliged to give that people value most.

In the last fifty years science has advanced more than in the 2,000 previous years and given mankind greater powers over the forces of nature than the ancients ascribed to their gods.

And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.

blind wantons like the gulls who scream And rip the edge off any ideal or dream.

I judge people's charm by the ease with which I express myself in their presence.