"...class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences , feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from theirs. The class experience is largely determined by the productive relations into which men are born—or enter involuntarily. Class-consciousness is the way in which these experiences are handled in cultural terms: embodied in traditions, value-systems, ideas, and institutional forms. If the experience appears as determined, class-consciousness does not. We can see a logic in the responses of similar occupational groups undergoing similar experiences, but we cannot predicate any law. Consciousness of class arises in the same way in different times and places, but never in just the same way."

“n the early eighties, I was turned aside once again, by the emergency of the “second cold war” and by the heavy demands of the peace movement. I do not regret this: I am convinced that the peace movement made a major contribution to dispersing the cold war, which had descended like a polluting cloud on every field of political and social life.”

“We are going to stop those piffling cruise missiles, you know, on land if not on sea. What we have to do is seize this moment of mass consciousness to move directly into the structures of the Cold War themselves, the blocs behind the missiles. We have to keep to some very large and simple ideas – like remaking Europe and putting peace and liberty together. ... This is the most serious political work I have ever done or will ever do in my life. It won't last long. If we succeed a little, the politicians will move in and take it off us.”

“We must commence to act as if a united, neutral and pacific Europe already exists. We must learn to be loyal, not to 'East' or 'West' but to each other, and we must disregard the prohibitions and limitations imposed by any national state.”

“I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the "obsolete" hand-loom weaver, the "Utopian" artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience; and, if they were casualties of history, they remain, condemned in their own lives, as casualties.”