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" 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. "

Tony Judt

Special

You

World

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

" 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

" How should we begin to make amends for raising a generation obsessed with the pursuit of material wealth and indifferent to so much else? "

" 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 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.' "

" 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

" Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life. "

" Reality is a powerful solvent. "

" 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. "

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

" 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 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. "

" I don't want to be the passively alert vegetable in the corner that takes in everything but can't communicate, which I think would suck a lot of life out of my family without giving very much to me. "

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

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

" 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. "

" Obviously a primary liberal conviction is that we should be tolerant of other peoples' convictions. But if we believe in something, we had better find ways to say so convincingly. "

" 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. "

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

Tony Judt

Irritate

I Am

" 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. "

" 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? "

" My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

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

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

" 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. "