Tony Judt Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

A handful of individual football stars - not necessarily the most talented, but those boasting good looks, beautiful wives and an animated private life - assumed a role in European public life and popular newspapers hitherto reserved for movie starlets or minor royalty. When David Beckham (an English player of moderate technical gifts but an unsurpassed talent for self-promotion) moved from Manchester United to Real Madrid in 2003, it made headline television news in every member-state of the European Union. Beckham's embarrassing performance at the European Football Championships in Portugal the following year - the England captain missed two penalties, hastening his country's ignominious early departure - did little to dampen the enthusiasm of his fans. — Tony Judt

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

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

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

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. — Tony Judt

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. — Tony Judt

The late Ralf Dahrendorf, an Anglo-German political scientist well placed to appreciate the scale of the changes he had seen in his lifetime, wrote of those optimistic years that "[i]n many respects the social democratic consensus signifies the greatest progress which history has seen so far. Never before have so many people had so many life chances."12 — Tony Judt

This makes it much easier to institute radical departures in public policy. In complex or divided societies, the chances are that a minority - or even a majority - will be forced to concede, often against its will. This makes collective policymaking contentious and favors a minimalist approach to social reform: better to do nothing than to divide people for and against a controversial project. — Tony Judt

Inequality is corrosive. It rots societies from within. — Tony Judt

Evil, above all evil on the scale practiced by Nazi Germany, can never be satisfactorily remembered. The very enormity of the crime renders all memorialisation incomplete. Its inherent implausibility - the sheer difficulty of conceiving of it in calm retrospect - opens the door to diminution and even denial. Impossible to remember as it truly was, it is inherently vulnerable to being remembered as it wasn't. — Tony Judt

Love, it seems to me, is the condition in which one is most contentedly oneself. — Tony Judt

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

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

The absence of trust is clearly inimical to a well-run society. The great Jane Jacobs noted as much with respect to the very practical business of urban life and the maintenance of cleanliness and civility on city streets. If we don't trust each other, our towns will look horrible and be nasty places to live. Moreover, she observed, you cannot institutionalize trust. Once corroded, it is virtually impossible to restore. — Tony Judt

Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life. — Tony Judt

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

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. — Tony Judt

Israel today is bad for the Jews, — Tony Judt

All around us we see a level of individual wealth unequaled since the early years of the 20th century. — Tony Judt

The wider the spread between the wealthy few and the impoverished many, the worse the social problems: a statement which appears to be true for rich and poor countries alike. What matters is not how affluent a country is but how unequal it is. — Tony Judt

The military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of its totality. — Tony Judt

As in the past, therefore, eastern Europeans have had to compete with the West on a markedly uneven playing field, lacking local capital and foreign markets and able to export only low-margin foods and raw materials or else industrial and consumer goods kept cheap thanks to low wages and public subsidy. — Tony Judt

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. — Tony Judt

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

The narcissism of student movements, new Left ideologues and the popular culture of the '60s generation invited a conservative backlash. — Tony Judt

Today, neither Left nor Right can find their footing. — Tony Judt

In the eyes of Hayek and his contemporaries, the European tragedy had thus been brought about by the shortcomings of the Left: first through its inability to achieve its objectives and then thanks to its failure to withstand the challenge from the Right. Each of them, albeit in different ways, arrived at the same conclusion: the best - indeed the only - way to defend liberalism and an open society was to keep the state out of economic life. — Tony Judt

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

Love, it seems to me, is that condition in which one is most contentedly oneself. If this sounds paradoxical, remember Rilke's admonition: love consists in leaving the loved one space to be themselves while providing the security within which the self may flourish. As a child, I always felt uneasy and a little constrained around people, my family in particular. Solitude was bliss, but not easily obtained. Being always felt stressful- wherever I was there was something to do, someone to please, a duty to be completed, a role inadequately fulfilled: something amiss. Becoming, on the other hand, was relief. I was never so happy as when I was going somewhere on my own, and the longer it took to get there, the better. Walking was pleasurable, cycling enjoyable, bus journeys fun. But the train was very heaven. — Tony Judt

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

What did trust, cooperation, progressive taxation and the interventionist state bequeath to western societies in the decades following 1945? The short answer is, in varying degrees, security, prosperity, social services and greater equality. We have grown accustomed in recent years to the assertion that the price paid for these benefits - in economic inefficiency, insufficient innovation, stifled entrepreneurship, public debt and a loss of private initiative - was too high. Most of these criticisms are demonstrably false. — Tony Judt

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

We no longer have political movement. While thousands of us may come together for a rally or march, we are bound together on such occasions by a single shared interest. Any effort to convert such interests into collective goals is usually undermined by the fragmented individualism of our concerns. Laudable goals - fighting climate change, opposing war, advocating public healthcare or penalizing bankers - are united by nothing more than the expression of emotion. In our political as in our economic lives, we have become consumers: choosing from a broad gamut of competing objectives, we find it hard to imagine ways or reasons to combine these into a coherent whole. We must do better than this. — Tony Judt

Marxism was the rhetorical awning under which very different dissenting styles could be gathered together - not least because it offered an illusory continuity with an earlier radical generation. But under that awning, and served by that illusion, the Left fragmented and lost all sense of shared purpose. — Tony Judt

All modern U.S. presidents are perforce politicians, prisoners of their past pronouncements, their party, their constituency, and their colleagues. — Tony Judt

Dissent and dissidence are overwhelmingly the work of the young. It is not by chance that the men and women who initiated the French Revolution, like the reformers and planners of the New Deal and postwar Europe, were distinctly younger than those who had gone before. Rather than resign themselves, young people are more likely to look at a problem and demand that it be solved. — Tony Judt

Familiarity reduces insecurity, so we feel more comfortable describing and combating the risks we think we understand: terrorists, immigrants, job loss or crime. But the true sources of insecurity in decades to come will be those that most of us cannot define: dramatic climate change and its social and environmental effects; imperial decline and its attendant 'small wars'; collective political impotence in the face of distant upheavals with disruptive local impact. These are the threats that chauvinist politicians will be best placed to exploit, precisely because they lead so readily to anger and humiliation. — Tony Judt

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

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. — Tony Judt

The moral courage required to hold a different view and to press it upon irritated readers or unsympathetic listeners remains everywhere in short supply. — Tony Judt

I don't much mind being expelled from communities. — Tony Judt

Contrast 1968, when the CEO of General Motors took home, in pay and benefits, about sixty-six times the amount paid to a typical GM worker. Today the CEO of Wal-Mart earns nine hundred times the wages of his average employee. Indeed, the wealth of the Wal-Mart founder's family in 2005 was estimated at about the same ($90 billion) as that of the bottom 40% of the US population: 120 million people. — Tony Judt

Unsurprisingly, planning was most admired and advocated at the political extremes. — Tony Judt

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

We are not merely historians but also and always citizens. — Tony Judt

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

Values such as these derived from longstanding religious or communitarian practices. — Tony Judt

However, there is something worse than idealizing the past - or presenting it to ourselves and our children as a chamber of horrors: forgetting it. — Tony Judt

Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world. — Tony Judt

From the late 19th century until the 1970s, the advanced societies of the West were all becoming less unequal. Thanks to progressive taxation, government subsidies for the poor, the provision of social services and guarantees against acute misfortune, modern democracies were shedding extremes of wealth and poverty. — Tony Judt

Social democracy does not represent an ideal future; it does not even represent the ideal past. — Tony Judt

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

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

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

People who live in private spaces contribute actively to the dilution and corrosion of the public space. In other words, they exacerbate the circumstances which drove them to retreat in the first place. — Tony Judt

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

Loss is loss, and nothing is gained by calling it by a nicer name. — Tony Judt

So what have Keynes's 'madmen in authority' done with the ideas they inherited from defunct economists? They have set about dismantling the properly economic powers and initiatives of the state. — Tony Judt

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

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

The historian's task is not to disrupt for the sake of it, but it is to tell what is almost always an uncomfortable story and explain why the discomfort is part of the truth we need to live well and live properly. A well organized society is one in which we know the truth about ourselves collectively, not one in which we tell pleasant lies about ourselves. — Tony Judt

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

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

Margaret Thatcher, like George W. Bush and Tony Blair after her, never hesitated to augment the repressive and information-gathering arms of central government. — Tony Judt

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

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. — Tony Judt

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

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

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

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. — Tony Judt

This reduction of 'society' to a thin membrane of interactions between private individuals is presented today as the ambition of libertarians and free marketeers. But we should never forget that it was first and above all the dream of Jacobins, Bolsheviks and Nazis: if there is nothing that binds us together as a community or society, then we are utterly dependent upon the state. Governments that are too weak or discredited to act through their citizens are more likely to seek their ends by other means: by exhorting, cajoling, threatening and ultimately coercing people to obey them. The loss of social purpose articulated through public services actually increases the unrestrained powers of the over-mighty state. — Tony Judt

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

We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. — Tony Judt

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

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. — Tony Judt

Ask ... what it is about all-embracing 'systems' of thought that leads inexorably to all-embracing 'systems' of rule. — Tony Judt

But I'm English. We don't do uplifting. — Tony Judt

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

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

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

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

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. — Tony Judt

financial transactions have displaced the production of goods or services as the source of private fortunes, distorting the value we place upon different kinds of economic activity. — Tony Judt

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

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

Politically speaking, ours is an age of the pygmies. — Tony Judt

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

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

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

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

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. — Tony Judt

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

An older generation of free market economists used to point out that what is wrong with socialist planning is that it requires the sort of perfect knowledge (of present and future alike) that is never vouchsafed to ordinary mortals. They were right. But it transpires that the same is true for market theorists: — Tony Judt

If it is to be taken seriously again, the Left must find its voice. There is much to be angry about: growing inequalities of wealth and opportunity; injustices of class and caste; economic exploitation at home and abroad; corruption and money and privilege occluding the arteries of democracy. — Tony Judt

Thinking 'economistically', as we have done now for thirty years, is not intrinsic to humans. — Tony Judt

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

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