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" 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. "

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

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

" I don't believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action. "

" The people whose necks hurt when I write about the Middle East tend to live in Brooklyn or Boca Raton: the kind of Zionist who pays another man to live in Israel for him. I have nothing but contempt for such people. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 know exactly how and where I am going to die. The only question is when. "

" 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

" 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

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

" If we have learned nothing else from the 20th century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences. Incremental improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for, and probably all we should seek. "

Tony Judt

Perfect

Hope

" 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. "

" We are not merely historians but also and always citizens. "

" 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. "

" 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

Optimism

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

" 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. "

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

Tony Judt

Irritate

I Am

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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? "

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

" History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same. "

" 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. "