Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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?' "

Related Quotes:

" 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

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

Tony Judt

Irritate

I Am

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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 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. "

" 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.' "

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

" 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. "