Tony Judt famous quotes

Love consists in leaving the loved one space to be themselves while providing the security within which that self may flourish.
-- Tony Judt

#Space #Self #Leaving

We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.
-- Tony Judt

#Citizens #Historian

As citizens of a free society, we have a duty to look critically at our world. But if we think we know what is wrong, we must act upon that knowledge.
-- Tony Judt

#Thinking #Our World #Looks

The people whose necks hurt when I write about the Middle East tend to live in Brooklyn or Boca Raton: the kind of Zionist who pays another man to live in Israel for him. I have nothing but contempt for such people.
-- Tony Judt

#Hurt #Writing #Men

We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.
-- Tony Judt

#Ideas #Cost

Undergraduates today can select from a swathe of identity studies.... The shortcoming of all these para-academic programs is not that they concentrate on a given ethnic or geographical minority; it is that they encourage members of that minority to study themselves - thereby simultaneously negating the goals of a liberal education and reinforcing the sectarian and ghetto mentalities they purport to undermine.
-- Tony Judt

#Ghetto #Goal #Identity

History can show you that it was one pile of bad stuff after another. It can also show you that there's been tremendous progress in knowledge, behaviour, laws, civilisation. It cannot show you that there was a meaning behind it.
-- Tony Judt

#Law #Progress #Stuff

I'm not sure I've learned anything new about life; but I've had to think harder about death and what comes after for other people.
-- Tony Judt

#Thinking #People

I know exactly how and where I am going to die. The only question is when.
-- Tony Judt

I've lost count of the interviews I've done about my illness and its relationship to my ideas and writing.
-- Tony Judt

#Writing #Ideas #Done

It does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel.
-- Tony Judt

#Israel #Doe

Reality is a powerful solvent.
-- Tony Judt

#Powerful #Reality

My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.
-- Tony Judt

#Book #Reading #Writing

I grew up in a world where the social democratic state was the norm, not the exception.
-- Tony Judt

#World #Social #Grew

I don't much mind being expelled from communities.
-- Tony Judt

#Community #Mind

I don't believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action.
-- Tony Judt

#Believe #Political #Size

We need to learn... how war brutalises and degrades winners and losers alike and what happens to us when, having heedlessly waged war for no good reason, we are encouraged to inflate and demonise our enemies in order to justify that war's indefinite continuance.
-- Tony Judt

#War #Order #Enemy

Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life.
-- Tony Judt

#Israel #Lines #Trump

At a certain point, to remain slightly tangential to wherever I was became a way of 'being Tony': by not being anything that everyone else was.
-- Tony Judt

#Way #Certain

But I'm English. We don't do uplifting.
-- Tony Judt

#Uplifting

History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.
-- Tony Judt

How should we begin to make amends for raising a generation obsessed with the pursuit of material wealth and indifferent to so much else?
-- Tony Judt

#Generations #Wealth #Obsessed

I can still boss people around. I can still write. I can still read. I can still eat, and I can still have very strong views.
-- Tony Judt

#Strong #Writing #Views

I do think we're on the edge of a terrifying world, and that many young people know that but don't know how to talk about it.
-- Tony Judt

#Thinking #People #World

I don't believe in an afterlife. I don't believe in a single or multiple godhead. I respect people who do, but I don't believe it myself.
-- Tony Judt

#Believe #Afterlife #People

After 1945 what happened was rather the opposite: with one major exception boundaries stayed broadly intact and people were moved instead.
-- Tony Judt

#Opposites #People #Boundaries

If active or concerned citizens forfeit politics, they thereby abandon their society to its most mediocre and venal public servants
-- Tony Judt

#Citizens #Forfeit #Mediocre

If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have
-- Tony Judt

#Fall #Substitutes

If we have learned nothing else from the 20th century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences. Incremental improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for, and probably all we should seek.
-- Tony Judt

#Perfect #Answers #Improvement

Judaism for me is a sensibility of collective self-questioning and uncomfortable truth-telling. I feel a debt of responsibility to this past. It is why I am Jewish.
-- Tony Judt

#Responsibility #Past #Self

The military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of its totality.
-- Tony Judt

#Military #Independent #Social

Words can make the illness a subject I can master, and not one that one simply emotes over.
-- Tony Judt

#Illness #Masters #Subjects

Israel today is bad for the Jews,
-- Tony Judt

#Israel #Today #Jew

It might be thought the height of poor taste to ascribe good fortune to a healthy man with a young family struck down at the age of sixty by an incurable degenerative disorder from which he must shortly die. But there is more than one sort of luck. To fall prey to a motor neuron disease is surely to have offended the Gods at some point, and there is nothing more to be said. But if you must suffer thus, better to have a well-stocked head...
-- Tony Judt

#Fall #Men #Healthy

We need to start talking about inequality again; we need to start talking about the inequities and unfairnesses and the injustices of an excessively divided society, divided by wealth, by opportunity, by outcome, by assets and so forth.
-- Tony Judt

#Opportunity #Talking #Outcomes

All modern U.S. presidents are perforce politicians, prisoners of their past pronouncements, their party, their constituency, and their colleagues.
-- Tony Judt

#Party #Past #President

Love, it seems to me, is the condition in which one is most contentedly oneself.
-- Tony Judt

#Oneself

Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives.
-- Tony Judt

#People #Alternatives #Inability

We have responsibilities for others, not just across space but across time. We have responsibilities to people who came before us. They left us a world of institutions, ideas or possibilities for which we, in turn, owe them something. One of the things we owe them is not to squander them.
-- Tony Judt

#Responsibility #Ideas #Space

Social democracy does not represent an ideal future; it does not even represent the ideal past.
-- Tony Judt

#Past #Democracy #Doe

The pleasures of mental agility are much overstated, inevitably - as it now appears to me - by those not exclusively dependent upon them.
-- Tony Judt

#Agility #Pleasure

American social arrangements, economic arrangements, the degree of inequality in American life, the relatively small role played by the government in American public life and so forth, compares to exactly the opposite conditions in most of the European societies.
-- Tony Judt

#Government #Opposites #Roles

I started work on my first French history book in 1969; on 'Socialism in Provence' in 1974; and on the essays in Marxism and the French Left in 1978. Conversely, my first non-academic publication, a review in the 'TLS', did not come until the late 1980s, and it was not until 1993 that I published my first piece in the 'New York Review.'
-- Tony Judt

#New York #Book #Pieces

I was born accidentally. I lived accidentally in London. We nearly migrated to New Zealand. So much of my life has been a product of chance, I can't see a meaning in it at all.
-- Tony Judt

#London #Chance #Born

There is nothing to be said for being crippled. You don't see the world better or clearer, nor do you develop some special set of skills by way of compensation.
-- Tony Judt

#Skills #Special #World

We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them.
-- Tony Judt

#Political #Answers #World

As recently as the 1970s, the idea that the point of life was to get rich and that governments existed to facilitate this would have been ridiculed: not only by capitalism's traditional critics but also by many of its staunchest defenders.
-- Tony Judt

#Ideas #Government #Wealth

Contrast 1968, when the CEO of General Motors took home, in pay and benefits, about sixty-six times the amount paid to a typical GM worker. Today the CEO of Wal-Mart earns nine hundred times the wages of his average employee. Indeed, the wealth of the Wal-Mart founder's family in 2005 was estimated at about the same ($90 billion) as that of the bottom 40% of the US population: 120 million people.
-- Tony Judt

#Home #Average #People

If we remain grotesquely unequal, we shall lose all sense of fraternity: and fraternity, for all its fatuity as a political objective, turns out to be the necessary condition of politics itself.
-- Tony Judt

#Political #Fraternity #Turns

What I am against is false optimism: the notion either that things have to go well, or else that they tend to, or else that the default condition of historical trajectories is characteristically beneficial in the long-run.
-- Tony Judt

#Running #Optimism #Long