Ernest Gellner Quotes

#1. Capital, like capitalism, seems an overrated category.

Ernest Gellner

#2. Nowledge which ... transcends the bounds, the prejudices and prejudgements of any one society and culture is not an illusion but, on the contrary, a glorious and luminous reality. Just how it was achieved remains subject to debate.

Ernest Gellner

#3. Just as every girl should have a husband, preferably her own, so every culture must have its state, preferably its own.

Ernest Gellner

#4. The strong belief that the interests of a particular nation-state are of primary importance. Also, the belief that a people who share a common language, history, and culture should constitute an independent nation, free of foreign domination.

Ernest Gellner

#5. The production of obscurity in Paris compares to the production of motor cars in Detroit in the great period of American industry.

Ernest Gellner

#6. Tribalism never prospers, for when it does, everyone will respect it as a true nationalism, and no-one will dare call it tribalism.

Ernest Gellner

#7. Civil Society is a cluster of institutions and associations strong enough to prevent tyranny, but which are, none the less, entered and left freely, rather than imposed by birth or sustained by awesome ritual. You can join the Labour Party without slaughtering a sheep ...

Ernest Gellner

#8. Philosophy is explicitness, generality, orientation and assessment. That which one would insinuate, thereof one must speak.

Ernest Gellner

#9. It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round.

Ernest Gellner

#10. Ideas, and even the detection of errors, require more than care and caution.

Ernest Gellner

#11. America was born modern; it did not have to achieve modernity, nor did it have modernity thrust upon it.

Ernest Gellner

#12. A cleric who loses his faith abandons his calling; a philosopher who loses his redefines his subject.

Ernest Gellner

#13. Obstruction of mobility, where it occurs, is one of the most serious and intractable problems of industrial society.

Ernest Gellner

#14. Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness; it invents nations where they do not exist ...

Ernest Gellner

#15. But the whole idea of knowledge, even, or especially, of oneself and one's own inner states, attained by direct contact and not dependent on theoretical and conceptual assumptions, is absurd.

Ernest Gellner

#16. People are even more reluctant to admit that man explains nothing, than they were to admit that God explains nothing.

Ernest Gellner

#17. He who possesses a reasonable, sound theoretical equipment will perceive correctly, however neurotic or wicked he may be personally; he who lacks it or possesses an unsound one, will perceive incorrectly, however pure of neurotic tensions or compulsions he may be.

Ernest Gellner

#18. It is precisely by binding things together that traditional visions perpetuate themselves and the prejudgments contained within them; and it is by insisting on prising things apart that we have liberated ourselves from them

Ernest Gellner

#19. [I am a humble adherent of] ... Enlightenment Rationalist Fundamentalism.

Ernest Gellner