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" 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
Free
Think
World
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" Social democracy does not represent an ideal future; it does not even represent the ideal past. "
Tony Judt
Ideal
Social
Democracy
" 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
Time
Turn
Ideas
" Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life. "
Tony Judt
You
Everything
Israel
" It does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel. "
Tony Judt
Me
Irritate
I Am
" I don't believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action. "
Tony Judt
Action
Political
Moral
" I grew up in a world where the social democratic state was the norm, not the exception. "
Tony Judt
Where
Social
World
" Popularizing - much less venturing beyond one's secure turf - was frowned upon for many years. I think I probably internalized the prohibition, even though I was - and knew I was - among the best speakers and writers of my age cohort. I don't mean I was the best historian - a quite different measure. "
Tony Judt
Best
Age
Mean
" I went to live on a kibbutz, and I'd idealized the world of collective, agrarian work, where everyone was equal, everyone contributed, that all this awful European intellectual stuff just fell away. "
Tony Judt
Work
World
Equal
" I do think we're on the edge of a terrifying world, and that many young people know that but don't know how to talk about it. "
Tony Judt
Think
People
Know
" 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
Chance
My Life
Born
" American social arrangements, economic arrangements, the degree of inequality in American life, the relatively small role played by the government in American public life and so forth, compares to exactly the opposite conditions in most of the European societies. "
Tony Judt
American
Government
Life
" 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
Wealth
Generation
Begin
" No one wants to live in a wheelchair unable to talk, only winking once for yes and twice for no. It's perfectly reasonable that there will come a point where the balance of judgment of life over death swings the other way. "
Tony Judt
Talk
Balance
Death
" 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
Everyone
Wherever
Point
" I don't much mind being expelled from communities. "
Tony Judt
Expelled
Much
Being
" When you are in my classroom, you get everything from me. But you bloody well better give everything too. "
Tony Judt
Everything
You
Better
" I see myself as, first and above all, a teacher of history; next, a writer of European history; next, a commentator on European affairs; next, a public intellectual voice within the American left; and only then an occasional, opportunistic participant in the pained American discussion of the Jewish matter. "
Tony Judt
See
History
Myself
" Social democrats are characteristically modest - a political quality whose virtues are overestimated. We need to apologise a little less for our shortcomings and speak more assertively of achievements. That these were always incomplete should not trouble us. "
Tony Judt
Speak
Quality
Political
" I think if I'm controversial it's not because I set out to be. It's because I've never felt comfortable being part of someone else's mainstream community. "
Tony Judt
Someone
Think
Community
" 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
Me
Feel
I Am
" Healthcare reform is a paradigmatic case. It is self-evidently necessary and inevitable and has been on the agenda for 35 years, and the political class seems completely unable to respond to it. "
Tony Judt
Healthcare
Political
Inevitable
" 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
Death
Life
New
" 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
Write
Boss
Strong
" I think Bush was seen as someone who was disentangling America from the connections that it had with the outside world, that it found encumbering for domestic purposes. "
Tony Judt
World
America
Connections
" Words can make the illness a subject I can master, and not one that one simply emotes over. "
Tony Judt
I Can
Master
Words
" The pleasures of mental agility are much overstated, inevitably - as it now appears to me - by those not exclusively dependent upon them. "
Tony Judt
Now
Agility
Me
" What has gone catastrophically wrong in England and the States is that for 30 years we've lost the ability to talk about the state in positive terms. We've raised a generation or two of young people who don't think to ask, 'What can the state do that is good?' "
Tony Judt
Think
Good
Lost
" 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
Progress
History
Knowledge
" It would be suicide in the American academy to show too early an interest beyond your doctoral specialization: charges of everything from charlatanry to ambition would be levied and tenure denied. I've seen this first-hand. "
Tony Judt
Suicide
Show
Early
" I believe that if we think back to the period from F.D.R. through, let us say, Bush I, until the end of the Cold War, we lived through an artificial period in which American interests and European interests essentially dovetailed. "
Tony Judt
End
American
War