Quote

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

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
Feel
Jewish
Feels
Uncomfortable
Debt
Telling
Judaism
Responsibility
Questioning
Past
Collectives
Truth
Sensibility
Self
Collective

More quotes by Tony Judt

Image
Israel today is bad for the Jews.
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
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
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
Image
I don't believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action.
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
Love consists in leaving the loved one space to be themselves while providing the security within which that self may flourish.
Tony Judt
Image
We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.
Tony Judt
Image
I don't much mind being expelled from communities.
Tony Judt
Image
We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.
Tony Judt
Image
If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have
Tony Judt
Image
History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.
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
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
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
After 1945 what happened was rather the opposite: with one major exception boundaries stayed broadly intact and people were moved instead.
Tony Judt
Image
My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.
Tony Judt
Image
It does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel.
Tony Judt
Image
The military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of its totality.
Tony Judt