Quote

Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives.

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
Best
Inability
People
Measured
Collectives
Collective
Holds
Alternatives
Ideology
Imagine
Thrall

More quotes by Tony Judt

Image
My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.
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
Reality is a powerful solvent.
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
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 grew up in a world where the social democratic state was the norm, not the exception.
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
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'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
After 1945 what happened was rather the opposite: with one major exception boundaries stayed broadly intact and people were moved instead.
Tony Judt
Image
I don't believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action.
Tony Judt
Image
If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have
Tony Judt
Image
Social democracy does not represent an ideal future it does not even represent the ideal past.
Tony Judt
Image
I don't much mind being expelled from communities.
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
Words can make the illness a subject I can master, and not one that one simply emotes over.
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
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
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
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