Tony Judt quotes - page 3

Tony Judt was a British historian, essayist, and university professor, known for his works on European history. His book "Postwar" is widely regarded as one of the most comprehensive accounts of Europe after World War II. He was also a prominent public intellectual who addressed issues such as politics, memory, and justice. Here are 96 of his quotes:

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

Tony Judt

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

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

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

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

Tony Judt

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

Tony Judt

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

Tony Judt

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

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

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

Tony Judt

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

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

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

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

Tony Judt

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

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

Love, it seems to me, is that condition in which one is most contentedly oneself.

Tony Judt

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

Tony Judt

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

Tony Judt

Today, neither Left nor Right can find their footing.

Tony Judt

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

Tony Judt

I don't much mind being expelled from communities.

Tony Judt