Quote

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

Tony Judt

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Tony Judt
Age: 62 †
Born: 1948
Born: January 2
Died: 2010
Died: August 6
Essayist
Historian
Non-Fiction Writer
Professor
Teacher
London
England
Tony Robert Judt
World
Norm
Exception
Democratic
Grew
State
Social
States

More quotes by Tony Judt

Image
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
Image
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
Image
My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.
Tony Judt
Image
Reality is a powerful solvent.
Tony Judt
Image
I don't much mind being expelled from communities.
Tony Judt
Image
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
Image
We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.
Tony Judt
Image
But I'm English. We don't do uplifting.
Tony Judt
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I've lost count of the interviews I've done about my illness and its relationship to my ideas and writing.
Tony Judt
Image
We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.
Tony Judt
Image
The East European small countries have a sense of betrayal, of having been forgotten by Western leaders.
Tony Judt
Image
The military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of its totality.
Tony Judt
Image
Social democracy does not represent an ideal future it does not even represent the ideal past.
Tony Judt
Image
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
Image
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
Image
If active or concerned citizens forfeit politics, they thereby abandon their society to its most mediocre and venal public servants
Tony Judt
Image
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.
Tony Judt
Image
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