Judt Quotes & Sayings

Lieux de memoire ... 'exist because there are no longer any milieux de memoire, settings in which memory is a real part of everyday experience.' And what are lieux de memoire? [They] are ... vestiges ... the rituals of a ritual-less society. — Tony Judt

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

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

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

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

History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same. — Tony Judt

If active or concerned citizens forfeit politics, they thereby abandon their society to its most mediocre and venal public servants — 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

If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have — 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

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

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

In a constitutionally ordered state, where laws are derived from broad principles of right and wrong and where those principles are enshrined and protected by agreed upon procedures and practices, it can never be in the long-term interest of the state or its citizens to flout those procedures at home or associate too closely overseas with the enemies of your founding ideals. — Tony Judt

How should we begin to make amends for raising a generation obsessed with the pursuit of material wealth and indifferent to so much else? Perhaps we might start by reminding ourselves and our children that it wasn't always thus. — 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

Once upon a time, one looked to society
or class, or community
for one's normative vocabulary: what was good for everyone was by definition good for anyone. But the converse does not hold. What is good for one person may or may not be of value or interest to another. Conservative philosophers of an earlier age understood this well, which was why they resorted to religious language and imagery to justify traditional authority and its claims upon each individual.
But the individualism of the new Left respected neither collective purpose nor traditional authority: it was, after all, both new and left. What remained to it was the subjectivism of private
and privately-measured
interest and desire. This, in turn, invited a resort to aesthetic and moral relativism: if something is good for me it is not incumbent upon me to ascertain whether it is good for someone else
much less to impose it upon them ("do your own thing"). — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.' — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If there were a party of those who aren't sure they're right, I'd belong to it.
~(Camus, as quoted by Tony Judt) — Albert Camus

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

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

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

Srebrenica was officially 'protected' not just by UN mandate but by a 400-strong peacekeeping contingent of armed Dutch soldiers. But when Mladic's men arrived the Dutch battalion laid down its arms and offered no resistance whatsoever as Serbian troops combed the Muslim community, systematically separating men and boys from the rest. The next day, after Mladic had given his 'word of honor as an officer' that the men would not be harmed, his soldiers marched the Muslim males, including boys as young as thirteen, out into the fields around Srebrenica. In the course of the next four days nearly all of them - 7,400 - were killed. The Dutch soldiers returned safely home to Holland. — 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

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

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

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

But at least their provision was universal, and for good and ill they were regarded as a public responsibility. — Tony Judt

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. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — 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

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

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

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

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. — Tony Judt

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

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

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

Far from addressing the Soviet nationalities question, the Afghan adventure had, as was by now all too clear, exacerbated it. If the USSR faced an intractable set of national minorities, this was in part a problem of its own making: it was Lenin and his successors, after all, who invented the various subject 'nations' to whom they duly assigned regions and republics. In an echo of imperial practices elsewhere, Moscow had encouraged the emergence - in places where nationality and nationhood were unheard of fifty years earlier - of institutions and intelligentsias grouped around a national urban center or 'capital. — 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

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

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. — Tony Judt

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

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. — Tony Judt

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

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. — Tony Judt

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. — Tony Judt

I am certainly influenced by certain post-structuralist traditions but also a number of other theoretical archives as well - including the brilliant work of Paulo Freire, Zygmunt Bauman, Loic Wacquant, Nancy Fraser, Tony Judt, and others. — Henry Giroux

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

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

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

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

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

Even after the Allies emerged triumphant in 1945, these concerns were not forgotten: depression and fascism remained ever-present in men's minds. The urgent question was not how to celebrate a magnificent victory and get back to business as usual, but how on earth to ensure that the experience of the years 1914-1945 would never be repeated. More than anyone else, it was Maynard Keynes who devoted himself to addressing this challenge. — 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

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

Reality is a powerful solvent. — 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