Ernest Gellner

"When knowledge is the slave of social considerations, it defines a special class; when it serves its own ends only, it no longer does so. There is of course a profound logic in this paradox: genuine k…"

"admirers claim that his supreme preoccupation was truth. His work, with its sad conjunction of extraordinary cunning in presentation with very thin content, leaves rather the impression of a man who h…"

"The way forward does not lie in amateur and comically timeless linguistic sociology which takes ‘forms of life’ for granted , but in the systematic study of forms of life which does not take them for …"

"In the twentieth century, the essence of man is not that he is a rational, or a political, or a sinful, or a thinking animal, but that he is an industrial animal. It is not his moral or intellectual o…"

"Tribalism never prospers, for when it does, everyone will respect it as a true nationalism, and no-one will dare call it tribalism."

"Philosophy is explicitness, generality, orientation and assessment. That which one would insinuate, thereof one must speak."

"In brief, nationalism is a theory of political legitimacy, which requires the ethnic boundaries should not be cut across political ones, and, in particular, that ethnic boundaries within a given state…"

"Just as every girl should have a husband, preferably her own, so every culture must have its state, preferably its own."