Tony Judt Quotes
Love consists in leaving the loved one space to be themselves while providing the security within which that self may flourish.
Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.
Words can make the illness a subject I can master, and not one that one simply emotes over.
Social democracy does not represent an ideal future; it does not even represent the ideal past.
If active or concerned citizens forfeit politics, they thereby abandon their society to its most mediocre and venal public servants
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.
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.
the military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of its totality.
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.
How should we begin to make amends for raising a generation obsessed with the pursuit of material wealth and indifferent to so much else?
After 1945 what happened was rather the opposite: with one major exception boundaries stayed broadly intact and people were moved instead.
Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives.
My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.
The pleasures of mental agility are much overstated, inevitably - as it now appears to me - by those not exclusively dependent upon them.
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.
The East European small countries have a sense of betrayal, of having been forgotten by Western leaders.
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.
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.
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.
I don't believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action.
All modern U.S. presidents are perforce politicians, prisoners of their past pronouncements, their party, their constituency, and their colleagues.
I've lost count of the interviews I've done about my illness and its relationship to my ideas and writing.
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.
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.
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.
Nationalist, anti-European, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim public political figures, seem a worrying picture of a possible European future. We could still fall back into pre-Europe... and it worries me.
Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so?