Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Social democracy does not represent an ideal future it does not even represent the ideal past.
Tony Judt
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Past
Doe
Even
Represent
Ideal
Ideals
Democracy
Future
Social
More quotes by Tony Judt
Israel today is bad for the Jews.
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
But I'm English. We don't do uplifting.
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
Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.
Tony Judt
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
Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives.
Tony Judt
Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life.
Tony Judt
We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.
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.
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
After 1945 what happened was rather the opposite: with one major exception boundaries stayed broadly intact and people were moved instead.
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
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
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
My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.
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
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
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
Words can make the illness a subject I can master, and not one that one simply emotes over.
Tony Judt