E. H. Carr

“The dilemma of reconciling political equality with political liberty was always resolved, down to the time of J. S. Mill, by defining liberty as freedom to do everything that did not restrict the liberty of others. But when equality comes to mean economic equality―or at any rate some enforced mitigation of economic inequality―and when liberty comes to mean something like liberty of opportunity, or free and equal access to the good things which society has to offer, the relation between equality and liberty takes on a new and much more baffling complexion.”

“Recognition of the truth behind the over-statements of revolutionary propaganda has long penetrated to circles which cannot be brought by any stretch of imagination within the orbit of socialism.”

“The renewed interest of the past two decades in "the rights of man", itself the product of notorious historical events, shows that mankind is at another of the great turning-points of history.”

“It was 1848 which shattered this comfortable dream. The dynastic principle, finally destroyed in France, was called in question and discredited all over central Europe; and, with popular sovereignty being now everywhere invoked as the basis of political authority, new nations began to make their voice heard.”

“In short, with the triumph of the industrial revolution and its inevitable consequence, the rise of the class-conscious proletariat, nothing could ever be the same again-not even political revolutions.”

“The essential result of the French revolution was to establish the doctrine of popular sovereignty as the foundation of modern Europe, though with no more precise definition of that elusive category "the people" than that popular sovereignty was the antithesis of the personal authority of the monarch.”

“History properly so-called can be written only by those who find and accept a sense of direction in history itself. The belief that we have come from somewhere is closely linked with the belief that we are going somewhere. A society which has lost belief in its capacity to progress in the future will quickly cease to concern itself with its progress in the past.”

“History therefore is a process of selection in terms of historical significance. To borrow Talcott Parsons’s phrase once more, history is ‘a selective system’ not only of cognitive, but of causal, orientations to reality. Just as from the infinite ocean of facts the historian selects those which are significant for his purpose, so from the multiplicity of sequences of cause and effect he extracts those, and only those, which are historically significant; and the standard of historical significance is his ability to fit them into his pattern of rational explanation and interpretation.”

“It is nonsense to say that generalization is foreign to history; history thrives on generalizations.”

“The historian and the facts of history are necessary to one another. The historian without his facts is rootless and futile; the facts without their historian are dead and meaningless. My first answer therefore to the question, What is History?, is that it is a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past.”

“The vogue of Marxism in Great Britain and France, which began on a modest scale after the success of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, rapidly gathered momentum, particularly among intellectuals, after 1934, when it was discovered that Soviet Russia was a potential military ally against Germany.”