Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
If active or concerned citizens forfeit politics, they thereby abandon their society to its most mediocre and venal public servants
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
Citizens
Forfeit
Public
Servants
Politics
Thereby
Society
Mediocre
Abandon
Servant
Active
Concerned
Venal
More quotes by 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
If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have
Tony Judt
Reality is a powerful solvent.
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
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
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
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
The military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of its totality.
Tony Judt
We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.
Tony Judt
I grew up in a world where the social democratic state was the norm, not the exception.
Tony Judt
I've lost count of the interviews I've done about my illness and its relationship to my ideas and writing.
Tony Judt
Israel today is bad for the Jews.
Tony Judt
But I'm English. We don't do uplifting.
Tony Judt
Love consists in leaving the loved one space to be themselves while providing the security within which that self may flourish.
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
Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives.
Tony Judt
The East European small countries have a sense of betrayal, of having been forgotten by Western leaders.
Tony Judt
Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.
Tony Judt
History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.
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