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" 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
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" I grew up in a world where the social democratic state was the norm, not the exception. "
Tony Judt
Where
Social
World
" 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
" 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
I Am
Go
Optimism
" 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
" I know exactly how and where I am going to die. The only question is when. "
Tony Judt
Going
Question
Know
" 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
" 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
" I started work on my first French history book in 1969; on 'Socialism in Provence' in 1974; and on the essays in Marxism and the French Left in 1978. Conversely, my first non-academic publication, a review in the 'TLS', did not come until the late 1980s, and it was not until 1993 that I published my first piece in the 'New York Review.' "
Tony Judt
Work
Book
New York
" For Europe to play a part in the world on the scale of its wealth and its population and its capacities, Europe has to be united in some way, and Europe is not united. "
Tony Judt
Wealth
Way
Population
" 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
" 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
" 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
Society
Wealth
Start
" In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them. "
Tony Judt
Words
I Am
Relationship
" My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books. "
Tony Judt
History
Strange
Reading
" It does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel. "
Tony Judt
Me
Irritate
I Am
" Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so? "
Tony Judt
Here
Difficulty
Why
" 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
" I don't much mind being expelled from communities. "
Tony Judt
Expelled
Much
Being
" We need to learn... how war brutalises and degrades winners and losers alike and what happens to us when, having heedlessly waged war for no good reason, we are encouraged to inflate and demonise our enemies in order to justify that war's indefinite continuance. "
Tony Judt
Need
Learn
Good
" 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 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
" I'm regarded outside New York University as a looney tunes leftie, self-hating Jewish communist; inside the university, I'm regarded as a typical, old-fashioned, white male liberal elitist. I like that. I'm on the edge of both; it makes me feel comfortable. "
Tony Judt
New
Me
Feel
" 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
" You don't have to be Jewish to understand the history of Europe in the 20th century, but it helps. "
Tony Judt
Europe
Understand
History
" 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 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
" I don't believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action. "
Tony Judt
Action
Political
Moral
" 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
" Reality is a powerful solvent. "
Tony Judt
Powerful
Reality
Solvent
" 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