Tony Judt Quotes
-
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.
→ -
Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives.
→ -
My generation those who were students in the late 60s was always, in the words of the Who, talking about our generation. That's what we thought of ourselves, as the most important thing since sliced bread. And the "we" that we meant was really the Western Europeans and American generation. And as I think back I suppose I have a sense of guilt on behalf of my generation, a sense that we were terribly provincial and didn't understand the really important stuff that was going on in Eastern Europe.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
The Second World War had a precipitating effect in that it discredited the empires, as well as bankrupting them. Not only could you no longer, if you were a colonial subject of France in Africa, look to France as a model of power and influence and civility after what had happened in the war. Nor could the French any longer afford to run their empire. And nor could the British, although they were not discredited in the way that the French were.
→ -
It's important to remember that World War II was experienced very much as a continuity in that sense. Most of World War II in most of Europe wasn't a war; it was an occupation. The war was at the beginning and the end, except in Germany and the Soviet Union, and even there really only at the end. So the rest of time it's an occupation, which in some ways was experienced as an extension of the interwar period. World War II was simply an extreme form, in a whole new key, of the disruption of normal life that began in 1914.
→ -
Although the United States lost a quarter of a million men and women, civilians and soldiers, in World War II, that's considerably less than the Russians lost in soldiers at the Battle of Stalingrad alone. It's important to convey to countries and to people and to generations who have no experience of the 20th century as it was lived in Europe just how catastrophic it was.
→ -
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.
→ -
There were various different keys in which European history had tended to be written. One is the lyrical key, the idea that somehow, in Bretton-Woods in 1945, a bunch of well-intentioned men got together and said, "This can't go on; let's build a European Union." And it just wasn't like that.
→ -
I know exactly how and where I am going to die. The only question is when.
→ -
How should we begin to make amends for raising a generation obsessed with the pursuit of material wealth and indifferent to so much else?
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
The rottenness of politics in Yugoslavia didn't come as a surprise. The main lesson is that this is a war which could have easily been stopped by Europe. What was lacking was any will to do so. It's an irony of the achievement of Europe that it had lived for 40 years under the assumption of the unimaginability of internal wars, so it didn't know what to do with it when it was confronted with one close up.
→ -
The military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of its totality.
→ -
Love, it seems to me, is that condition in which one is most contentedly oneself.
→ -
The American financial and military commitment really only kicks in with Korea. Not that Korea was the real game for the Americans; their real fear was that this was just the prelude to a second Korea in Germany. We now know from the Soviet archives that the last thing Stalin was going to do was start a war in Central Europe. The Americans didn't know that, and it was the fear that he might which transformed NATO from a sort of shell game into a real military alliance. That total commitment basically transformed the Marshal Plan into military aid.
→ -
Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life.
→ -
Love consists in leaving the loved one space to be themselves while providing the security within which that self may flourish.
→ -
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.
→ -
Undergraduates today can select from a swathe of identity studies.... The shortcoming of all these para-academic programs is not that they concentrate on a given ethnic or geographical minority; it is that they encourage members of that minority to study themselves - thereby simultaneously negating the goals of a liberal education and reinforcing the sectarian and ghetto mentalities they purport to undermine.
→ -
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.
→ -
After 1945 what happened was rather the opposite: with one major exception boundaries stayed broadly intact and people were moved instead.
→ -
History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.
→ -
I grew up in a world where the social democratic state was the norm, not the exception.
→ -
It does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel.
→ -
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.
→ -
Yugoslavia served as a reminder that the lessons of World War Two were only partially learned. There's a great line someone wrote in the middle of the 1990s, at the time when Clinton was agonizing about whether or not to go into Bosnia: "Everyone says, 'Never again. Never again.' But all they really mean is never again will Germans kill Jews in the streets of Warsaw".
→
Related Authors
-
Eric Hobsbawm Historian -
Fernand Braudel Historian -
Raymond Aron Philosopher -
Erich Maria Remarque Author -
Albert Camus Author -
Antonio Gramsci Writer -
Karl Marx Philosopher -
Leszek Kolakowski Philosopher -
James Truslow Adams Writer -
E. P. Thompson Historian -
John Sexton Professor -
Hannah Arendt Philosopher -
John Mearsheimer Professor -
-
Anne Applebaum Journalist -
Arthur Koestler Author -
Timothy Garton Ash Historian -
Norman Davies Historian -
John Lewis Gaddis Historian -
Leon Blum Prime Minister of France