Perry Anderson Quotes

[P]olitics is always a Kampfplatz.

[A] resistance that dispenses with consolations is always stronger than one which relies on them.

It should be a matter of honour on the Left to write at least as well, without redundancy or clutter, as its adversaries.

Moral indignation is too precious an export to be wasted at home

Nothing like this has been attempted before. ( ... ) It might be called a literary Porto Alegre. That implies a beginning, with much fierce argument and discussion to come. But whatever the outcome of ensuing criticisms or objections, The World Republic of Letters
empire more than republic, as Casanova shows
is likely to have the same sort of liberating impact at large as Said's Orientalism, with which it stands comparison.

a genius of means, barren of ends

Intellectuals are judged not by their morals, but by the quality of their ideas, which are rarely reducible to simple verdicts of truth or falsity, if only because banalities are by definition accurate.