E.P. Thompson Quotes

#1. I think you will find scientists that think like you in Germany and Britain, and you will find politicians that think like Weinberger. I think the most bellicose ruling group in the Western world at the moment is the British.

E.P. Thompson

#2. This going into Europe will not turn out to be the thrilling mutual exchange supposed. It is more like nine middle-aged couples with failing marriages meeting in a darkened bedroom in a Brussels hotel for a group grope.

E.P. Thompson

#3. There is not a thought that is being thought in the West or the East that is not active in some Indian mind

E.P. Thompson

#4. The working class did not rise like the sun at an appointed time. It was present at its own making.

E.P. Thompson

#5. The readings of Soviet society are as many as the experts you speak to. In my view, it's a society that is overdue for measures of democratization and organization.

E.P. Thompson

#6. For two decades the state has been taking liberties, and these liberties were once ours.

E.P. Thompson

#7. The missiles come first, and the justifications come second.

E.P. Thompson

#8. I will hear no talk that there are no intermediate-range weapons on the NATO side.

E.P. Thompson

#9. The talk about balance, nuclear balance, seems to me to be metaphysical and doesn't seem to be real at all.

E.P. Thompson

#10. In this Postscript I distinguish references back to the revised text of this book by placing these in italics thus (262), from references to the works of other authors under discussion, which are thus (p. 162). account

E.P. Thompson

#11. I am convinced that we are in a terminal process.

E.P. Thompson

#12. You know as a scientist that both were developed completely independently of each other in the laboratories. And only afterward were the political situations contrived out of which they could be justified.

E.P. Thompson

#13. At a certain point one ceases to defend a certain view of history; one must defend history itself.

E.P. Thompson

#14. Could I interrupt here, because there is an alternative explanation, which you are particularly well placed to examine. You know the argument that it is the alchemists in the laboratories who invent the sweet new kits.

E.P. Thompson

#15. There are no European voices at Geneva, there are no European voices at START.

E.P. Thompson

#16. We must not look at the past with the enormous condescension of posterity.

E.P. Thompson

#17. I don't care tuppence whether I'm forced into a leadership position or not. I'd much sooner not.

E.P. Thompson

#18. I have become a prisoner of the peace movement. But you can't say that the termination is coming and then say that you are going back to your own garden to dig.

E.P. Thompson

#19. I think that the U.S. does have this very much more open attitude, and I admire it very much and I think it's very important to the world. But the information and the discussion sometimes come too late, after the effective decision has been made.

E.P. Thompson