Eric Hobsbawm citations (50 citations)

Source: Bandits (1969), Chapter Two
Contexte: Banditry is freedom, but in a peasant society few can be free. most are shackled by double chains of lordship and labour, one reinforcing the other. For what makes peasants the victim of authority is not as much their economic vulnerability - indeed they are as often as not virtually self sufficient - as their mobility.

“As I think back, I ask myself, again and again: was there an alternative to the indiscriminate, brutal, basically unplanned rush forward of the Five-Year Plan? I wish I could say there was, but I cannot. I cannot find a answer.”

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Eric Hobsbawm livre L'Âge des extrêmes

Source: The Age of Extremes (1992), Chapter Sixteen, End of Socialism

“Uncertainty and unpredictability impended. Compass needles no longer had a North, maps became useless.”

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Eric Hobsbawm livre L'Âge des extrêmes

Source: The Age of Extremes (1992), Chapter Eleven, Cultural Revolution, p.338-339
Contexte: The old moral vocabulary of rights and duties, mutual obligations, sin and virtue, sacrifice, conscience, rewards, and penalties, could no longer be translated into the new language of desired gratification. Once such practices and institutions were no longer accepted as part of a way of ordering society that linked people to each other and ensured social cooperation and reproduction, most of their capacity to structure human social life vanished. They were reduced simply expressions of individuals' preferences, and claims that the law should recognize the supremacy of these preferences. Uncertainty and unpredictability impended. Compass needles no longer had a North, maps became useless.

“My object is to understand ad explain why things turned out the way they did, and how they hang together.”

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Eric Hobsbawm livre L'Âge des extrêmes

Introduction
The Age of Extremes (1992)
Contexte: My object is to understand ad explain why things turned out the way they did, and how they hang together. For anyone of my age-group who has lived through all or most of the Short Twentieth Century this is inevitably also a autobiographical endeavor. We are talking about, amplifying (and correcting) our own memories. And we are talking as men and women of a particular time and place, involved, in various ways, in its history as actors in its dramas - however insignificant our parts - as observers of our times and, not least, as people whose views of the century have been formed by what we have come to see as its crucial events.

“Words are witnesses which often speak louder than documents.”

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Eric Hobsbawm

Introduction
The Age of Revolution (1962)
Contexte: Words are witnesses which often speak louder than documents. Let us consider a few English words, which were invented or gained their modern meanings, substantially in the period of sixty years with which this volume deals. They are such words as 'industry', 'industrialist', 'factory,' middle class,' 'working class,' and 'socialism.' They include 'aristocracy,' as well as 'railway,' 'liberal' and 'conservative' as political terms, 'nationality,'scientist,' and 'engineer,' 'proletariat,' and (economic) 'crisis'.

“Why brilliant fashion-designers, a notoriously non-analytic breed, sometimes succeed in anticipating the shape of things to come better than professional predictors, is one of the most obscure questions in history; and, for the historian of culture, one of the most central.”

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Eric Hobsbawm livre L'Âge des extrêmes

Source: The Age of Extremes (1992), Chapter Six, The Arts 1914-1945

“Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market.”

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Eric Hobsbawm

“It is a melancholy illusion of those who write books and articles that the printed word survives. Alas, it rarely does.”

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Eric Hobsbawm

Source: How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism

“Liberalism was failing. If I'd been German and not a Jew, I could see I might have become a Nazi, a German nationalist. I could see how they'd become passionate about saving the nation. It was a time when you didn't believe there was a future unless the world was fundamentally transformed.”