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There are cases - perhaps mine is among them - where this discovery can be particularly helpful. Much of my life, probably most of my conscious life, was devoted to a hope which has been plainly disappointed, and to a cause which has plainly failed: the communism initiated by the October Revolution. But there is nothing which can sharpen the historian's mind like defeat.

— Eric Hobsbawm On History (1997)

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More quotes by Eric Hobsbawm

Xenophobia looks like becoming the mass ideology of the 20th-century fin-de-siecle.

Divided Europeans: Understanding Ethnicities in Conflict (1999)

Human beings are not efficiently designed for a capitalist system of production.

The Age of Extremes (1992)

As the global expansion of Indian and Chinese restaurants suggests, xenophobia is directed against foreign people, not foreign cultural imports.

Nations without a past are contradictions in terms.

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)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Eric Hobsbawm (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.