Top 40 Tony Judt Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Tony Judt Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losin

In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them.
Tony Judt
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
History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.
Tony Judt
I don’t believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action.
Tony Judt
The pleasures of mental agility are much overstated, inevitably – as it now appears to me – by those not exclusively dependent upon them.
Tony Judt
I just like being on my own on trains, traveling. I spent all my pocket money travelling the London Underground and Southern Railway, what used to be the Western region, and in Europe as much as I could afford it. My parents used to think I was going places, but I wasn’t, I was just travelling the trains.
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
It does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel.
Tony Judt
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
I believe that if we think back to the period from F.D.R. through, let us say, Bush I, until the end of the Cold War, we lived through an artificial period in which American interests and European interests essentially dovetailed.
Tony Judt
Popularizing – much less venturing beyond one’s secure turf – was frowned upon for many years. I think I probably internalized the prohibition, even though I was – and knew I was – among the best speakers and writers of my age cohort. I don’t mean I was the best historian – a quite different measure.
Tony Judt
I grew up in a world where the social democratic state was the norm, not the exception.
Tony Judt
My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.
Tony Judt
Words can make the illness a subject I can master, and not one that one simply emotes over.
Tony Judt
I think Bush was seen as someone who was disentangling America from the connections that it had with the outside world, that it found encumbering for domestic purposes.
Tony Judt
Healthcare reform is a paradigmatic case. It is self-evidently necessary and inevitable and has been on the agenda for 35 years, and the political class seems completely unable to respond to it.
Tony Judt
I went to live on a kibbutz, and I’d idealized the world of collective, agrarian work, where everyone was equal, everyone contributed, that all this awful European intellectual stuff just fell away.
Tony Judt
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
What has gone catastrophically wrong in England and the States is that for 30 years we’ve lost the ability to talk about the state in positive terms. We’ve raised a generation or two of young people who don’t think to ask, ‘What can the state do that is good?’
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
Social democrats are characteristically modest – a political quality whose virtues are overestimated. We need to apologise a little less for our shortcomings and speak more assertively of achievements. That these were always incomplete should not trouble us.
Tony Judt
I don’t want to be the passively alert vegetable in the corner that takes in everything but can’t communicate, which I think would suck a lot of life out of my family without giving very much to me.
Tony Judt
I’m regarded outside New York University as a looney tunes leftie, self-hating Jewish communist; inside the university, I’m regarded as a typical, old-fashioned, white male liberal elitist. I like that. I’m on the edge of both; it makes me feel comfortable.
Tony Judt
Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life.
Tony Judt
For Europe to play a part in the world on the scale of its wealth and its population and its capacities, Europe has to be united in some way, and Europe is not united.
Tony Judt
I would say that I have become more radical as I have gotten older. I started out very radical when I was young, like most people, but I became less actively politically engaged in the middle of my life.
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
You don’t have to be Jewish to understand the history of Europe in the 20th century, but it helps.
Tony Judt
I know exactly how and where I am going to die. The only question is when.
Tony Judt
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
Social democracy does not represent an ideal future; it does not even represent the ideal past.
Tony Judt
I can still boss people around. I can still write. I ca

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’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
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?
Tony Judt
Obviously a primary liberal conviction is that we should be tolerant of other peoples’ convictions. But if we believe in something, we had better find ways to say so convincingly.
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
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
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.
Tony Judt
I see myself as, first and above all, a teacher of history; next, a writer of European history; next, a commentator on European affairs; next, a public intellectual voice within the American left; and only then an occasional, opportunistic participant in the pained American discussion of the Jewish matter.
Tony Judt
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