Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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

Feel

I Am

Related Quotes:

" I don't much mind being expelled from communities. "

" 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. "

" When you are in my classroom, you get everything from me. But you bloody well better give everything too. "

" Words can make the illness a subject I can master, and not one that one simply emotes over. "

" 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

" 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. "

" There is nothing to be said for being crippled. You don't see the world better or clearer, nor do you develop some special set of skills by way of compensation. "

" You don't have to be Jewish to understand the history of Europe in the 20th century, but it helps. "

" Reality is a powerful solvent. "

" 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. "

" I've lost count of the interviews I've done about my illness and its relationship to my ideas and writing. "

" It does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel. "

Tony Judt

Irritate

I Am

" Social democracy does not represent an ideal future; it does not even represent the ideal past. "

" 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?' "

" I just like being on my own on trains, traveling. I spent all my pocket money travelling the London Underground and Southern Railway, what used to be the Western region, and in Europe as much as I could afford it. My parents used to think I was going places, but I wasn't, I was just travelling the trains. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I would say that I have become more radical as I have gotten older. I started out very radical when I was young, like most people, but I became less actively politically engaged in the middle of my life. "

" 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

Feel

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Nationalist, anti-European, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim public political figures, seem a worrying picture of a possible European future. We could still fall back into pre-Europe... and it worries me. "

Tony Judt

Fall

Political

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I grew up in a world where the social democratic state was the norm, not the exception. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I was born in 1948, so I'm a '60s kid, and in the '60s everyone talked all the time, endlessly, about socialism versus capitalism, about political choices, ideology, Marxism, revolution, 'the system' and so on. "