Imagined Communities Quotes

Benedict Anderson describes the unified feeling of nationalism as being imagined because in a nation citizens can only rely on faith that their contemporaries share the same beliefs. Nationalism "is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members... yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion." Without meeting or even talking to every member in the nation, the unity of nationalism is only a thought.

Benedict Anderson relates the imagined communities to a type of fraternity with enough comradeship to offer such sacrifices as large as life itself.  "This fraternity... makes it possible... for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings." The fraternity of nationalism is a great enough force to evoke extremities.