Quote

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

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
Anything
Think
Thinking
Life
Harder
People
Learned
Sure
Comes
Death

More quotes by Tony Judt

Image
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
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
Image
Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives.
Tony Judt
Image
Words can make the illness a subject I can master, and not one that one simply emotes over.
Tony Judt
Image
Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life.
Tony Judt
Image
There were various different keys in which European history had tended to be written. One is the lyrical key, the idea that somehow, in Bretton-Woods in 1945, a bunch of well-intentioned men got together and said, This can't go on let's build a European Union. And it just wasn't like that.
Tony Judt
Image
The East European small countries have a sense of betrayal, of having been forgotten by Western leaders.
Tony Judt
Image
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
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
My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.
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 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
I've lost count of the interviews I've done about my illness and its relationship to my ideas and writing.
Tony Judt
Image
I don't much mind being expelled from communities.
Tony Judt
Image
Israel today is bad for the Jews.
Tony Judt
Image
It does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel.
Tony Judt
Image
Social democracy does not represent an ideal future it does not even represent the ideal past.
Tony Judt
Image
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
Image
I grew up in a world where the social democratic state was the norm, not the exception.
Tony Judt
Image
Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.
Tony Judt