Tony Judt Quotes

#1. As recently as the 1970s, the idea that the point of life was to get rich and that governments existed to facilitate this would have been ridiculed: not only by capitalism's traditional critics but also by many of its staunchest defenders.

Tony Judt

#2. The military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of its totality.

Tony Judt

#3. Our problem is to work out a social organization which shall be as efficient as possible without offending our notions of a satisfactory way of life." - JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

Tony Judt

#4. Markets do not automatically generate trust, cooperation or collective action for the common good. Quite the contrary: it is in the nature of economic competition that a participant who breaks the rules will triumph - at least in the short run - over more ethically sensitive competitors.

Tony Judt

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

Tony Judt

#6. 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.

Tony Judt

#7. I don't much mind being expelled from communities.

Tony Judt

#8. Beneficiaries of the welfare states whose institutions they call into question, they are all Thatcher's children: politicians who have overseen a retreat from the ambitions of their predecessors.

Tony Judt

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

Tony Judt

#10. We must distinguish better than some of our predecessors between desirable ends and unacceptable means.

Tony Judt

#11. Values such as these derived from longstanding religious or communitarian practices.

Tony Judt

#12. 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

#13. After 1945 what happened was rather the opposite: with one major exception boundaries stayed broadly intact and people were moved instead.

Tony Judt

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. For the postwar peace, he preferred to minimize direct government intervention and manipulate the economy through fiscal and other incentives.

Tony Judt

#18. 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

#19. We are all the beneficiaries of those who went before us, as well as those who will care for us in old age or ill health.

Tony Judt

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

Tony Judt

#21. 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

#22. open societies will once again be urged to close in upon themselves, sacrificing freedom for 'security'.

Tony Judt

#23. That the state might exceed its remit and damage the market by distorting its operations was not taken very seriously in these years.

Tony Judt

#24. 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.

Tony Judt

#25. High taxation was not regarded in these years as an affront. On the contrary, steep rates of progressive income tax were seen as a consensual device to take excess resources away from the privileged

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#26. What, then, should we have learned from 1989? Perhaps, above all, that nothing is either necessary or inevitable.

Tony Judt

#27. What an enormous longing for a new human order there was in the era between the world wars, and what a miserable failure to live up to it.'(Arthur Koestler)

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

Tony Judt

#29. 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.

Tony Judt

#30. 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

#31. Loss is loss, and nothing is gained by calling it by a nicer name.

Tony Judt

#32. Thinking 'economistically', as we have done now for thirty years, is not intrinsic to humans.

Tony Judt

#33. 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

#34. True, many radicals of the '60s were quite enthusiastic supporters of imposed choices, but only when these affected distant peoples of whom they knew little.

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#35. Keynes himself had taken the view that capitalism would not survive if its workings were reduced to merely furnishing the wealthy with the means to get wealthier.

Tony Judt

#36. 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

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

Tony Judt

#38. Israel today is bad for the Jews,

Tony Judt

#39. 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.

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#40. Politically speaking, ours is an age of the pygmies.

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#41. The only thing worse than too much government is too little: in failed states, people suffer at least as much violence and injustice as under authoritarian rule, and in addition their trains do not run on time.

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#42. If we remain grotesquely unequal, we shall lose all sense of fraternity: and fraternity, for all its fatuity as a political objective, turns out to be the necessary condition of politics itself.

Tony Judt

#43. 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

#44. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.

Tony Judt

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

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#46. Inequality is corrosive. It rots societies from within.

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#47. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them.

Tony Judt

#48. 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.

Tony Judt

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

Tony Judt

#50. Today's schoolchildren and college students can imagine little else but the search for a lucrative job.

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#51. Dialectics, as a veteran communist explained ... 'is the art and technique of always landing on your feet.

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#52. The pleasures of mental agility are much overstated, inevitably - as it now appears to me - by those not exclusively dependent upon them.

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

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#54. But I'm English. We don't do uplifting.

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#55. Socialism for social democrats, especially in Scandinavia, was a distributive concept. It was about making sure that wealth and assets were not disproportionately gathered into the hands of a privileged few. And this, as we have seen, was in essence a moral matter:

Tony Judt

#56. 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.

Tony Judt

#57. 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.

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#58. Love, it seems to me, is the condition in which one is most contentedly oneself.

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#59. 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.

Tony Judt

#60. But the disposition to disagree, to reject and to dissent - however irritating it may be when taken to extremes - is the very lifeblood of an open society. We need people who make a virtue of opposing mainstream opinion. A democracy of permanent consensus will not long remain a democracy.

Tony Judt

#61. 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.

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#62. All modern U.S. presidents are perforce politicians, prisoners of their past pronouncements, their party, their constituency, and their colleagues.

Tony Judt

#63. Edmund Burke in his critique of the French Revolution. Any society, he wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in France, which destroys the fabric of its state, must soon be "disconnected into the dust and powder of individuality".

Tony Judt

#64. By the late '60s, the culture gap separating young people from their parents was perhaps greater than at any point since the early 19th century.

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#65. The disposition to disagree, to reject and to dissent - however irritating it may be when taken to extremes - is the very lifeblood of an open society. We need people who make a virtue of opposing mainstream opinion.

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#66. 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

#67. If politi-cians - however well-intentioned - were barred from planning, manipulating, or directing the affairs of their fellow citizens, then extremists of Right and Left alike would be kept at bay.

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#68. 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.

Tony Judt

#69. Reality is a powerful solvent.

Tony Judt

#70. It is tempting to conform: community life is a lot easier where everyone appears to agree with everyone else, and where dissent is blunted by the conventions of compromise.

Tony Judt

#71. Without idealism, politics is reduced to a form of social accounting, the day-to-day administration of men and things. This too is something that a conservative can survive well enough. But for the Left it is a catastrophe.

Tony Judt

#72. We need to rediscover how to talk about change: how to imagine very different arrangements for ourselves, free of the dangerous cant of 'revolution'.

Tony Judt

#73. The bungling, the mendacity and the cynicism of the men responsible both for the disaster and the attempt to cover it up could not be dismissed as a regrettable perversion of Soviet values: they were Soviet values, as the Soviet leader began to appreciate.

Tony Judt

#74. Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives.

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#75. Unsurprisingly, planning was most admired and advocated at the political extremes.

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#76. 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

#77. So why has this potentially self-destructive system of economic arrangements lasted? Probably because of habits of restraint, honesty and moderation which accompanied its emergence.

Tony Judt

#78. Finding a homeland is not the same as dwelling in the place where our ancestors once used to live. - KRZYSZTOF CZYZEWSKI

Tony Judt

#79. But each in its own way was affected by the growing intolerance of immoderate inequality, initiating public provision to compensate for private inadequacy.

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#80. 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.

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#81. The intellectual case for planning was never very strong. Keynes, as we have seen, regarded economic planning much as he did pure market theory: in order to succeed, both required impossibly perfect data.

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#82. If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have

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#83. I don't believe in an afterlife. I don't believe in a single or multiple godhead. I respect people who do, but I don't believe it myself.

Tony Judt

#84. 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.

Tony Judt

#85. Post-national, welfare-state, cooperative, pacific Europe was not born of the optimistic, ambitious, forward-looking project imagined in fond retrospect by today's Euro-idealists. It was the insecure child of anxiety.

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#86. Today, neither Left nor Right can find their footing.

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#87. a political class deeply sensitive to its moral and social responsibilities.

Tony Judt

#88. 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

#89. 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

#90. Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.

Tony Judt

#91. Ask ... what it is about all-embracing 'systems' of thought that leads inexorably to all-embracing 'systems' of rule.

Tony Judt

#92. The idea that it was the state's business to know what was good for people - while we accept it uncomplainingly in school curriculums and hospital practices - smacked of eugenics and perhaps euthanasia.

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#93. 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.

Tony Judt

#94. Whatever Americans fondly believe, their government has always had its fingers in the economic pie. What distinguishes the USA from every other developed country has been the widespread belief to the contrary.

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#95. All around us we see a level of individual wealth unequaled since the early years of the 20th century.

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#96. These days, we take pride in being tough enough to inflict pain on others.

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#97. Those who got the twentieth century right, whether in anticipation [..] or as contemporary observations, had to be able to imagine a world for which there was no precedent.

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#98. We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.

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#99. 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

#100. Keynes died in 1946, exhausted by his wartime labors. But he had long since demonstrated that neither capitalism nor liberalism would survive very long without one another.

Tony Judt