Tony Judt Quotes

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Tony Judt

Profession : Historian

Birth : January 2, 1948

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

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

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

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

In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them.

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 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

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

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

Reality is a powerful solvent.

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 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

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

We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.

Tony Judt

I don't much mind being expelled from communities.

Tony Judt