Quotes from Ernest Gellner

Tribalism never prospers, for when it does, everyone will respect it as a true nationalism, and no-one will dare call it tribalism.

It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round.

Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.

It is precisely by binding things together that traditional visions perpetuate themselves and the prejudgments contained within them; and it is by insisting on prising things apart that we have liberated ourselves from them

I am deeply sensitive to the spell of nationalism. I can play about thirty Bohemian folk songs ... on my mouth-organ. My oldest friend, who is Czech and a patriot, cannot bear to hear me play them because he says I do it in such a schmalzy way, 'crying into the mouth organ'. I do not think I could have written the book on nationalism which I did write, were I not capable of crying, with the help of a little alcohol, over folk songs, which happen to be my favourite form of music.

But the whole idea of knowledge, even, or especially, of oneself and one's own inner states, attained by direct contact and not dependent on theoretical and conceptual assumptions, is absurd.

He who possesses a reasonable, sound theoretical equipment will perceive correctly, however neurotic or wicked he may be personally; he who lacks it or possesses an unsound one, will perceive incorrectly, however pure of neurotic tensions or compulsions he may be.

A cleric who loses his faith abandons his calling; a philosopher who loses his redefines his subject.

The strong belief that the interests of a particular nation-state are of primary importance. Also, the belief that a people who share a common language, history, and culture should constitute an independent nation, free of foreign domination.

Nationalism is primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent.

Naively, one may suppose those at the Top who take decisions are poly­mathic supermen, somehow qualified to assess the many-sided implications of their decisions. Acquaintance with any of them dispels such illusions.

Wars did not cease in the twentieth century, notwithstanding the growth of international trade: it was not GATT but MAD, mutually assured destruction, which prevented large-scale wars after 1945.

It is nationalists above all who flirt with Marxism

Relativism does entail nihilism: if standards are inherently and inescapably expressions of something called culture, and can be nothing else, then no culture can be subjected to a standard, because (ex hypothesi) there cannot be a trans-cultural standard which would stand in judgement over it. No argument could be simpler or more conclusive.

The central mistake committed both by the friends and the enemies of nationalism is the supposition that it is somehow natural.

Those who are opposed to nationalism, generally mean by this only that they are opposed to expansionist excesses, to violence and domination, and they desire national loyalty to be complemented and superseded by an international order and rule of law. But this, commendable though it may be, leaves the nationalist picture untouched, though it strives to ' go beyond it'.

Nations as a natural, God-given way of classifying men, as an inherent though long-delayed political destiny, are a myth; nationalism, which sometimes takes pre-existing cultures and turns them into nations, sometimes invents them, and often obliterates pre-existing cultures: that is a reality, for better or worse, and in general an inescapable one. Those who are its historic agents know not what they do, but that is another matter.

People are even more reluctant to admit that man explains nothing, than they were to admit that God explains nothing.

The production of obscurity in Paris compares to the production of motor cars in Detroit in the great period of American industry.

A cleric who loses his faith abandons his calling; a philosopher who loses his redefines his subject.