Eric Hobsbawm

"Banditry is freedom, but in a peasant society few can be free. most are shackled by double chains of lordship and labour, one reinforcing the other. For what makes peasants the victim of authority is …"

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

"My object is to understand ad explain why things turned out the way they did, and how they hang together. For anyone of my age-group who has lived through all or most of the Short Twentieth Century th…"

"In theory its object was to set all human beings free. All progressive, rationalist and humanist ideologies are implicit in it and indeed come out of it."

"Liberalism was failing. If I'd been German and not a Jew, I could see I might have become a Nazi, a German nationalist. I could see how they'd become passionate about saving the nation. It was a time …"

"The point about social bandits is that they are peasant outlaws whom the lord and state regard as criminals, but who remain within peasant society, and are considered by their people as heroes, as cha…"

"A farm-labourer and cowherd, had joined the Bourbon army, killed a comrade in a brawl, deserted and lived as an outlaw for ten years. He joined the liberal insurgents in 1860 in the hope of an amnesty…"

"The really frightening risk of war was neglect, filth, poor organization, defective medical services, and hygenic ignorance, which conditions practically everybody."