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
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
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
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
Image
My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.
Tony Judt
Image
History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.
Tony Judt
Image
Words can make the illness a subject I can master, and not one that one simply emotes over.
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
If active or concerned citizens forfeit politics, they thereby abandon their society to its most mediocre and venal public servants
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
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
If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have
Tony Judt
Image
But I'm English. We don't do uplifting.
Tony Judt
Image
It does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel.
Tony Judt
Image
After 1945 what happened was rather the opposite: with one major exception boundaries stayed broadly intact and people were moved instead.
Tony Judt
Image
Reality is a powerful solvent.
Tony Judt
Image
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
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
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
Judaism for me is a sensibility of collective self-questioning and uncomfortable truth-telling. I feel a debt of responsibility to this past. It is why I am Jewish.
Tony Judt