Eric Hobsbawm

"Justice demands understanding the structural roots of inequality."

"The most important thing about a people's history is not what happened, but how people remember it and why they remember it that way."

"Tradition is a guide to the future, not a prisoner of the past."

"The great advantage of the dead is that they don't come back to contradict us."

"All skilled workers are not the same and should not be treated as such."

"Nations without a past are contradictions in terms."

"The gap between rich and poor is not the result of nature but of policy."

"Revolution is the locomotive of history."

"Nationalism requires too much belief in things that are clearly untrue."

"The twentieth century was perhaps the most violent in recorded history."

"We live in a world of radical uncertainty, yet we must act as if our actions matter."

"The decline of working-class militancy is not inevitable but political."

"Barbarism and civilization are not as far apart as we pretend."

"The capacity of human beings to ignore unpalatable reality is remarkable."

"Class consciousness is not spontaneous; it must be built through struggle."

"Memory and imagination are not opposites but partners in understanding."

"Progress is not a law of nature but a human achievement."

"The writer's obligation is to tell what happened, not what should have happened."

"Intellectuals without a movement are as powerless as movements without intellectuals."

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there, but it shapes our present."

"Economic systems are human creations and can be changed by human will."

"The difference between history and myth is that history requires evidence."

"Mass literacy transformed the world more than any political revolution."

"Empires do not fall because of their enemies but because of their contradictions."

"The study of history is not for the faint-hearted or those seeking comfort."

"Labor movements succeed not because workers are virtuous but because they organize."

"The invention of traditions is a modern phenomenon, not an ancient one."

"We cannot understand the present without understanding what came before."

"The greatest obstacle to understanding the past is our present prejudices."

"War is not the continuation of politics but its catastrophic failure."