Tony Judt Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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

  Tony Judt (2010). “The Memory Chalet”, p.40, Penguin

  53 Copy quote

• Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.

  Tony Judt

  Memories, World, Disenchantment

  Tony Judt (2006). “Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945”, p.910, Penguin

  15 Copy quote

• We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.

  Tony Judt

  Ideas, Cost, Knows

  Tony Judt (2010). “Ill Fares the Land”, p.11, Penguin

  18 Copy quote

• The different American experience of the 20th Century is crucial because the lesson of the century for Europe, which essentially is that the human condition is tragic, led it to have a build a welfare system and a set of laws and social arrangements that are more prophylactic than idealistic. It's not about building perfect futures; it's about preventing terrible pasts. I think that is something that Europeans in the second half of the 20th century knew in their bones and Americans never did, and it's one of the big differences between the two Western cultures.

  Tony Judt

  Past, Thinking, Perfect

  "Postwar". Interview With Julian Brookes, www.motherjones.com. December 20, 2005.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Tony Judt (2010). “Ill Fares the Land”, p.109, Penguin

  8 Copy quote

• Israel today is bad for the Jews.

  Tony Judt

  Israel, Today, Jew

  Tony Judt (2015). “When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995-2010”, p.93, Penguin

  13 Copy quote

• It's important to remember that World War II was experienced very much as a continuity in that sense. Most of World War II in most of Europe wasn't a war; it was an occupation. The war was at the beginning and the end, except in Germany and the Soviet Union, and even there really only at the end. So the rest of time it's an occupation, which in some ways was experienced as an extension of the interwar period. World War II was simply an extreme form, in a whole new key, of the disruption of normal life that began in 1914.

  Tony Judt

  War, Important, World

  "Postwar". Interview With Julian Brookes, www.motherjones.com. December 20, 2005.

  5 Copy quote

• Social democracy does not represent an ideal future; it does not even represent the ideal past.

  Tony Judt

  Past, Democracy, Doe

  Tony Judt (2010). “Ill Fares the Land”, p.109, Penguin

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  13 Copy quote

• 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

  Tony Judt (2010). “Ill Fares the Land”, p.84, Penguin

  8 Copy quote

• History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.

  Tony Judt

  Happens

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  9 Copy quote

• The Second World War had a precipitating effect in that it discredited the empires, as well as bankrupting them. Not only could you no longer, if you were a colonial subject of France in Africa, look to France as a model of power and influence and civility after what had happened in the war. Nor could the French any longer afford to run their empire. And nor could the British, although they were not discredited in the way that the French were.

  Tony Judt

  Running, War, World

  Source: www.motherjones.com

  5 Copy quote

• 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, Citizens

  Tony Judt (2010). “Ill Fares the Land”, p.114, Penguin

  7 Copy quote

• 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, Behaviour

  10 Copy quote

• Reality is a powerful solvent.

  Tony Judt

  Powerful, Reality

  5 Copy quote

• I worry that we have forgotten that the de-ideologized, de-politicized, uncontentious public space of the last 50 years as Europeans have experienced it is not the normal human condition. We shall be sorry to have abandoned a little too quickly the institutions that were set up by our parents and grandparents to protect themselves against a return of the bad old world. Because the bad old world can still come back to haunt you.

  Tony Judt

  Sorry, Grandparent, Worry

  Source: www.motherjones.com

  4 Copy quote

• Although the United States lost a quarter of a million men and women, civilians and soldiers, in World War II, that's considerably less than the Russians lost in soldiers at the Battle of Stalingrad alone. It's important to convey to countries and to people and to generations who have no experience of the 20th century as it was lived in Europe just how catastrophic it was.

  Tony Judt

  Country, War, Men

  "Postwar". Interview With Julian Brookes, www.motherjones.com. December 20, 2005.

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Tony Judt (2010). “Ill Fares the Land”, p.93, Penguin

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  8 Copy quote

• 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, Needs

  "Tony Judt: 'I am not pessimistic in the very long run'". Interview With Stephen Foley, www.independent.co.uk. March 24, 2010.

  6 Copy quote

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

  Tony Judt

  Book, Reading, Writing

  5 Copy quote

• The East European small countries have a sense of betrayal, of having been forgotten by Western leaders.

  Tony Judt

  Country, Betrayal, Leader

  Source: www.motherjones.com

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Tony Judt (2010). “Ill Fares the Land”, p.11, Penguin

  5 Copy quote

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