quotes from Anderson

1. Anderson refutes Gellner's idea that nations are 'invented.' Instead, he defines nations as "imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their members...yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion." (6) According to Anderson, all communities are imagined because most of the members in that community will never actually meet each other; even within the smallest of nations, the majority of people will never actually engage in any form of face-to-face contact.

2. In order to explain a person's attachment to his or her nation, a person's willingness to die for the sake of his or her nation, Anderson points to the 'natural ties' a person has to his or her community: "nation-ness is assimilated to skin-colour, gender, parentage and birth-era - all those things one can not help." (143) Anderson presents this idea that nation-ness is a characteristic much like race or gender, one that cannot be controlled but rather is part of a person from his or her very birth.