The greatest cruelties of our century have been the impersonal cruelties of remote decision, of system and routine, especially when they could be jus… - Eric Hobsbawm

Bourgeois triumph thus imbued the French Revolution with the agnostic or secular-moral ideology of the eighteenth century enlightenment, and since the idiom of that revolution became the general language of all subsequent social revolutionary movements, it transmitted this secularism...

First, utopianism is probably a necessary social device for generating the superhuman efforts without which no major revolution is achieved.

[N]o serious historian of nations and nationalism can be a committed political nationalist... Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so.