Benedict AndersonThinkers

An Imagined community is a community enabled by print capitalism and based not on face-to-face interactions. It precedes and unifies rather than.

The Imagined community is an idea based on the notion that all communities are imagined and thus are to be distinguished, not by their falsity or their genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.

An Imagined community is said to be 'imagined' because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.

The Nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail.

The Nation is an imagined political community, imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.

A Nation is an imagined political community, imagined in that fellow members will never meet each other face-to-face. It involves a horizontal comradeship that cuts across any actual inequalities.

The Nation is imaged as a community because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship, making it possible for so many million people to die for such limited imaginings.

The Nation is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which enlightenment and revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm.

The Nation is limited because even the largest nation has finite, if elastic boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. No nationalist dreams that all the human race will join their nation.

Nationalism is a fairly recent cultural phenomenon which is capable of generating colossal sacrifices.

Nationalism is an ideology with its roots at the end of the 18th century.

Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness. It invents nations where they do not exist.