On Nationalism Quotes

“We must never forget the multidimensionality of human beings in society.”
― Eric J. Hobsbawm, On Nationalism

“It is harder today for a Jew to be anti-Zionist, critical of the policy of Israel, or even non-Zionist, than ever before, because dissent from the majority position, whether right or wrong, carries the stigma of some sort of treason.”
― Eric J. Hobsbawm, On Nationalism

“The rise of sport provided new expressions of nationalism through the choice or invention of nationally specific sports – Welsh rugby as distinct from English soccer, and Gaelic football in Ireland (1884),”
― Eric J. Hobsbawm, On Nationalism

“In Britain, as the war was to show, even clerks and salesmen in the service of the nation could become officers and – in the brutally frank terminology of the British upper class – ‘temporary gentlemen’.”
― Eric J. Hobsbawm, On Nationalism

“Hobsbawm uses this to define modern states where, at least since the end of the nineteenth century, the inhabitants have imagined themselves (with considerable help from state institutions and political organizations) as being bonded together, by language, culture and ethnicity, as a homogeneous community – a standing invitation to get rid of ‘the others’ by ‘ethnic cleansing’. This is what makes the ‘concept of a single, exclusive, and unchanging ethnic or cultural or other identity a dangerous piece of brainwashing’.25 A single”
― Eric J. Hobsbawm, On Nationalism

“It is for Irishmen to criticize the absurdities of Irish nationalism, Welshmen those of Welsh nationalism, Englishmen those of their own brand – which are harder to detect than the others, at any rate for themselves. Nobody else can do it for them. This may be difficult, unpopular, and at times even hopeless, but the nation which lacks internal critics is lost, like Germany in Hitler’s days.”
― Eric J. Hobsbawm, On Nationalism