Quotes from Eric J. Hobsbawm

there are men who regret that we cannot hear our Handel exactly as Handel meant us to because, unfortunately, we no longer castrate boy singers

No doubt the British saw themselves fighting for liberty against tyranny; but in 1815 most Englishmen were probably poorer and worse off than they had been in 1800, while most Frenchmen were almost certainly better off; nor had any except the still negligible wage-labourers lost the substantial economic benefits of the Revolution

In times of revolution nothing is more powerful than the fall of symbols.

Though the web of history cannot be unravelled into separate threads without destroying it, a certain amount of subdivision of the subject is, for practical purposes, essential.

Pocas cosas hay más peligrosas que un imperio que persigue su propio interés con la creencia de que le está haciendo un favor a la humanidad.

En términos morales, los imperios siempre se han justificado a sí mismos, y en ocaciones no sin una cierta sinceridad, tanto cuando afirmaban que llevaban (su versión de) civilización o la religión a unos pueblos sumidos en la ignorancia, como cuando decían llevar (su versión de) la libertad a los oprimidos (por otro imperio) o, en la actualidad, cuando se presentan como los campeones de los derechos humanos.

The characteristic modern state, which had been evolving for several centuries, is a territorially coherent and unbroken area with sharply defined frontiers, governed by a single sovereign authority and according to a single fundamental system of administration and law.

History does not consult the convenience of historians, though some of them are not always aware of it.

Annexation, peace-treaties, and the Congresses in which the French systematically attempted to reorganize the German political map (in 1797–8 and 1803) reduced the 234 territories of the Holy Roman Empire—not counting free imperial knights and the like—to forty;

We may thus conclude that the kilt is a purely modern costume, first designed, and first worn, by an English Quaker industrialist, and that it was bestowed by him on the Highlanders in order not to preserve their traditional way of life but to ease its transformation: to bring them out of the heather and into the factory.

Economically the perspectives of the Constituent Assembly were entirely liberal: its policy for the peasantry was the enclosure of common lands and the encouragement of rural entrepreneurs, for the working-class, the banning of trade unions, for the small crafts, the abolition of guilds and corporations.

what there of is of jazz at its best is heavy stuff: it is small, but made of uranium

For all invented traditions, so far as possible, use history as a legitimator of action and cement of group cohesion.

Quando gli uomini si trovano di fronte a qualcosa di nuovo che li coglie impreparati, si affannano a cercare le parole per dare un nome all'ignoto, anche quando non possono definirlo né comprenderlo.

El mundo del tercer milenio seguirá siendo, muy probablemente, un mundo de violencia política y de cambios políticos violentos. Lo único que resulta inseguro es hacia dónde llevarán

Aunque el ideal terrenal del socialismo y el comunismo se haya derrumbado, los problemas que este ideal intentaba resolver permanecen: se trata de la descarada utilización social del desmesurado poder del dinero, que muchas veces dirige el curso de los acontecimientos. Y si la lección global del siglo XX no produce una seria reflexión, el inmerso torbellino rojo puede repetirse de principio a fin. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, en New York Times 28 de noviembre de 1993

Si estas décadas demostraron algo, fue que el principal problema del mundo, y por su puesto del mundo desarrollado, no era cómo multiplicar la riqueza de las naciones, sino cómo distribuirla en beneficio de sus habitantes

En resumen, y contra lo que pudiera parecer, el siglo XX mostró que se puede gobernar contra todo el pueblo por algún tiempo, y contra una parte del pueblo todo el tiempo, pero no contra todo el pueblo todo el tiempo

No sabemos a dónde vamos, sino tan sólo que la historia nos ha llevado hasta este punto y -si los lectores comparten el planteamiento de este libro- por qué. Sin embargo, una cosa está clara: si la humanidad ha de tener un futuro, no será prolongando el pasado o el presente. Si intentamos construir el tercer milenio sobre estas bases, fracasaremos. Y el precio del fracaso, esto es, la alternativa a una sociedad transformada, es la oscuridad

It is for Irishmen to criticize the absurdities of Irish nationalism, Welshmen those of Welsh nationalism, Englishmen those of their own brand – which are harder to detect than the others, at any rate for themselves. Nobody else can do it for them. This may be difficult, unpopular, and at times even hopeless, but the nation which lacks internal critics is lost, like Germany in Hitler's days.

Moreover, the very needs of the war obliged any government to centralize and discipline, at the expense of the free, local, direct democracy of club and section, the casual voluntarist militia, the free argumentative elections on which the Sansculottes thrived. The process which, during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–9, strengthened Communists at the expense of Anarchists, strengthened Jacobins of Saint-Just's stamp at the expense of Sansculottes of Hébert's.

A purely state-based patriotism is not necessarily ineffective, since the very existence and functions of the modern territorial citizen-state constantly involve its inhabitants in its affairs, and, inevitably, provide an institutional or procedural 'landscape' which is unlike any other such landscape and is the setting for their lives, which it largely determines.

In the countryside the systematic requisitioning of food (which the urban Sansculottes had been the first to advocate) alienated the peasantry.

France as a state, with its interests and aspirations confronted (or was in alliance with) other states of the same kind, but on the other hand France as the Revolution appealed to the peoples of the world to overthrow tyranny and embrace liberty, and the forces of conservatism and reaction opposed her. No doubt after the first apocalyptic years of revolutionary war the difference between these two strands of conflict diminished