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The past is therefore a permanent dimension of the human consciousness, an inevitable component of the institutions, values and other patterns of human society. The problem for historians is to analyse the nature of this 'sense of the past' in society and to trace its changes and transformations.

— 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.