13 quotes
Human beings are not efficiently designed for a capitalist system of production.
The Age of Extremes (1992)
In the simplest terms the question who or what caused the Second World War can be answered in two words: Adolf Hitler.
The Age of Extremes (1992)
My object is to understand ad explain why things turned out the way they did, and how they hang together.
The Age of Extremes (1992)
The tragedy of the October revolution was precisely that it could only produce its kind of ruthless, brutal, command socialism.
The Age of Extremes (1992)
The paradox of communism in power was that it was conservative.
The Age of Extremes (1992)
Uncertainty and unpredictability impended. Compass needles no longer had a North, maps became useless.
The Age of Extremes (1992)
The world that went to pieces at the end of the 1980's was the world shaped by the impact of the Russian Revolution of 1917.
The Age of Extremes (1992)
The destruction of the past, or rather of the social mechanisms that link one's contemporary experience to that of earlier generations, is one of the most characteristic and eerie phenomena of the late twentieth century.
The Age of Extremes (1992)
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.
The Age of Extremes (1992)
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.
The Age of Extremes (1992)
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.
The Age of Extremes (1992)
Surrealism was a genuine addition to the repertoire of avant-garde arts, its novelty attested by the ability to produce shock, incomprehension, or what amounted to the same thing, a sometimes, embarrassed laughter, even among the older avant-garde.
The Age of Extremes (1992)
The best approach to this cultural revolution is therefore through family and household, i.e. through the structure of relations between the secondhand generations. In most societies this had been impressively resistant to sudden change, though this does not mean that such structures were static.
The Age of Extremes (1992)