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People may not like to meet bandits, especially on a dark night, but a taste for reading about them seems to be universal.

— Eric Hobsbawm Bandits (1969)

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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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Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

Francis Bacon Meditationes sacræ (1597)

It is not in the books of the Philosophers, but in the religious symbolism of the Ancients, that we must look for the footprints of Science, and re-discover the Mysteries of Knowledge.

Albert Pike Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871)

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.

Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

Logan Pearsall Smith Afterthoughts (1931)

Attribution

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.