Tony Judt quotes - page 3

I know exactly how and where I am going to die. The only question is when. (Tony Judt)
History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Tony Judt
My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books. View quote
Tony Judt
I grew up in a world where the social democratic state was the norm, not the exception. View quote
Tony Judt
It does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Tony Judt
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)
Words can make the illness a subject I can master, and not one that one simply emotes over. View quote
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. View quote
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? View quote
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. View quote
Tony Judt
Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives. View quote
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.' View quote
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. View quote
Tony Judt
Love, it seems to me, is that condition in which one is most contentedly oneself. View quote
Tony Judt
The military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of its totality. View quote
Tony Judt
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)
All modern U.S. presidents are perforce politicians, prisoners of their past pronouncements, their party, their constituency, and their colleagues. View quote
Tony Judt
Today, neither Left nor Right can find their footing. View quote
Tony Judt
I don't believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action. View quote
Tony Judt
I don't much mind being expelled from communities. View quote
Tony Judt