Tony Judt Short Quotes

15 Sourced Quotes

View all Tony Judt Quotes
I am, I discover in late middle age, a work in progress.

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

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

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

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
Love consists in leaving the loved one space to be themselves while providing the security within which that self may flourish.

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

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

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?

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
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
Sixty years after Hitler's death, his war and its consequences are entering history. Postwar in Europe lasted a very long time, but it is finally coming to a close.

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
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