Quotes from Tony Judt

For the postwar peace, he preferred to minimize direct government intervention and manipulate the economy through fiscal and other incentives.

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.

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.

It is one of the curiosities of Communist reformers that they always set out with the quixotic goal of reforming some aspects of their system while keeping others unaffected—introducing market-oriented incentives while maintaining central planning controls, or allowing greater freedom of expression while retaining the Party's monopoly of truth.

It was altogether appropriate that Horst Mahler, one of the few surviving founders of Left terrorism in West Germany, should end up three decades later on the far Right of the political spectrum.

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

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

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

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.

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

How should we begin to make amends for raising a generation obsessed with the pursuit of material wealth and indifferent to so much else?

Since 1973, however, free-market theorists had re-emerged, vociferous and confident, to blame endemic economic recession and attendant woes upon 'big government' and the dead hand of taxation and planning that it placed upon national energies and initiative. In many places this rhetorical strategy was quite seductive to younger voters with no first-hand experience of the baneful consequences of such views the last time they had gained intellectual ascendancy, half a century before.

Marxismus je sekulární náboženství – to je evidentní. Ale které náboženství vlastnÄ› následuje, není vždycky zÃ…â"¢ejmé. Zahrnuje v sobÄ› velkou ?ást tradi?ní kÃ…â"¢esÃ…Â¥anské eschatologie: pád ?lovÄ›ka, MesiáÅ¡e, jeho utrpení, zástupné vykoupení lidstva, spásu, zmrtvýchvstání a tak dál.

But the most serious objection to French plans for post-war Germany was that they took little account of the interests or plans of France's Western allies, an imprudent oversight at a time when France was utterly dependent on those same allies not just for her security but for her very livelihood. On secondary issues—such as a customs and monetary union with

Ztráta víry samozÃ…â"¢ejmÄ› zdaleka není tak atraktivní jako víra; i když odklon od ní m?že být racionální, ztrácíte tím víc, než získáváte.

The truth of authenticity is different from the truth of honesty. To be authentic is to live as one wishes others to live; to be honest is to admit that this is impossible.

Mladí d?stojníci, s nimiž jsem byl v kontaktu, pocházeli pÃ…â"¢edevÅ¡ím z metropolí a mÄ›st, ne z kibuc?, a díky nim jsem pochopil, co jsem mÄ›l chápat už dávno: že sen o venkovském socialismu je právÄ› jen sen. T?žiÅ¡tÄ› židovského státu budou a musí pÃ…â"¢edstavovat mÄ›sta.

V následujících letech Izrael znehodnotí, podkopá a nakonec zni?í význam a využitelnost holokaustu a omezí jej na to, co v nÄ›m již dnes pÃ…â"¢iznanÄ› mnoho lidí vidí, totiž izraelskou výmluvu pro vlastní neblahé po?ínání.

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

Odjet do Å panÄ›lska bojovat za republiku bylo nesmírnÄ› lákavé. Byl to zp?sob, jak se stát antifaÅ¡istou, v atraktivním prostÃ…â"¢edí se zapojit do spole?nosti ?elící velmi prostým dilemat?m.

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.

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.

Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world. Most of what it has to offer is discomforting, even disruptive—which is why it is not always politically prudent to wield the past as a moral cudgel with which to beat and berate a people for its past sins.

Keynes died in 1946, exhausted by his wartime efforts. But he had long since demonstrated that neither capitalism nor liberalism would survive very long without one another. And since the experience of the interwar years had clearly revealed the inability of capitalists to protect their own best interests, the liberal state would have to do it for them whether they liked it or not.