Imagined Community Quotes

The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.

The imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people.

The funny thing is, nationalism only could have come about in Europe after the invention of printing. You could have this thing that was a book in a vernacular language, and you could imagine there were other readers of this book who you couldn't see, but they were a theoretical union of readers who all use the same language. That is kind of a prerequisite for a national fantasy. You need that thing, and it's a strange thing.

A public is a necessary fiction.

Indeed, the constellation of local radio was part of how America’s sense of itself emerged. Because listeners could sample the flavor of people in far-away states, they began to develop an understanding of the nation’s psyche. It was a way of imagining a country that you hadn’t seen. One station might be playing hillbilly music, one might be playing jazz. It was this really frothy brew of culture.

When I write, I have a sort of secret kinship of readers in all countries who don't know each other but each of whom, when they read my book, feels at home in it. So I write for those readers. It's almost a sense of writing for a specific person, but it's a specific person who I don't know.

All nations are imagined communities, and our imagined community is based on a uniquely inspiring set of principles. Americans have proved that they can be loyal to, and will fight on behalf of, a more complex, more cerebral national ideal, one derived from ideas of democracy and justice as opposed to blood and soil.

It is true that the poet does not directly address his neighbors; but he does address a great congress of persons who dwell at the back of his mind, a congress of all those who have taught him and whom he has admired; they constitute his ideal audience and his better self.