Quote

The military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of its totality.

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
Nation
Military
System
Nations
Totality
Social
Section
Sections
Aspect
Independent

More quotes by 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
My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.
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
Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives.
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
Image
Love consists in leaving the loved one space to be themselves while providing the security within which that self may flourish.
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
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
It does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel.
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
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
History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.
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
I've lost count of the interviews I've done about my illness and its relationship to my ideas and writing.
Tony Judt
Image
Social democracy does not represent an ideal future it does not even represent the ideal past.
Tony Judt
Image
If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have
Tony Judt
Image
I don't believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action.
Tony Judt