Eric Hobsbawm: a life in quotes

On his academic career: "Every historian has his or her lifetime, a private perch from which to survey the world. My own perch is constructed, among other materials, of a childhood in the Vienna of the 1920s, the years of Hitler's rise in Berlin, which determined my politics and my interest in history, and the England, and especially the Cambridge, of the 1930s, which confirmed both." 1993 Creighton lecture

On history: "History is being invented in vast quantities … it's more important to have historians, especially sceptical historians, than ever before." 2002 Observer interview

On communism: "I was a loyal Communist party member for two decades before 1956 and therefore silent about a number of things about which it's reasonable not to be silent." 2002 interview

On socialism and capitalism: "Impotence therefore faces both those who believe in what amounts to a pure, stateless, market capitalism, a sort of international bourgeois anarchism, and those who believe in a planned socialism uncontaminated by private profit-seeking. Both are bankrupt. The future, like the present and the past, belongs to mixed economies in which public and private are braided together in one way or another. But how? That is the problem for everybody today, but especially for people on the left." 2009 Guardian article

On the death of his parents: "In the late evening of Friday 8 February 1929 my father returned from another of his increasingly desperate visits to town in search of money to earn or borrow, and collapsed outside the front door of our house. My mother heard his groans through the upstairs windows and, when she opened them on the freezing air of that spectacularly hard alpine winter, she heard him calling to her. Within a few minutes he was dead … In dying, he also condemned to death my mother … 'Something has broken inside me,' she wrote to her sister." Interesting Times, his 2002 memoir

On Tony Blair: "Labour prime ministers who glory in trying to be warlords – subordinate warlords particularly – certainly stick in my gullet." 2002 interview

On nations: "Nations exist not only as functions of a particular kind of territorial state or the aspiration to establish one … but also in the context of a particular stage of technological and economic development. Most students today will agree that standard national languages, spoken or written, cannot emerge as such before printing, mass literacy and hence, mass schooling. It has even been argued that popular spoken Italian as an idiom capable of expressing the full range of what a 20th-century language needs outside the domestic and face-to-face sphere of communication, is only being constructed today as a function of the needs of national television programming." Nations and Nationalism since 1780, published in 1990

On war in the 20th century: "I lived through the first world war, when 10 million to 20 million people were killed. At the time, the British, French and Germans believed it was necessary. We disagree. In the second world war, 50 million died. Was the sacrifice worthwhile? I frankly cannot face the idea that it was not. I can't say it would have been better if the world was run by Adolf Hitler." 2002 Guardian profile

On war in the 21st century: "A tentative forecast: war in the 21st century is not likely to be as murderous as it was in the 20th. But armed violence, creating disproportionate suffering and loss, will remain omnipresent and endemic – occasionally epidemic – in a large part of the world. The prospect of a century of peace is remote." 2002 Counterpunch article

On his writing room's bookshelves: "Most of them, however, are filled with the foreign editions of my books. Their numbers amaze and please me and they still keep coming as new titles are translated and some fresh vernacular markets – Hindi, Vietnamese – open up. As I can't read most of them, they serve no purpose other than as a bibliographic record and, in moments of discouragement, as a reminder that an old cosmopolitan has not entirely failed in 50 years of trying to communicate history to the world's readers." 2008 Guardian article

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