Quote

Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.

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
Confirms
Contributes
Unlike
Memory
Memories
History
World
Reinforces
Disenchantment

More quotes by 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
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
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
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
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
Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life.
Tony Judt
Image
I can still boss people around. I can still write. I can still read. I can still eat, and I can still have very strong views.
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
The military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of its totality.
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
If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have
Tony Judt
Image
My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.
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
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
Reality is a powerful solvent.
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'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
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 know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.
Tony Judt