Quotes from Tony Judt

Nonetheless, he was sensitive not just to the need for countercyclical economic policies to head off future depression, but also to the prudential virtues of 'the social security state'.

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.

In Hungary, during the years 1948–53, about one million people (of a total population of less than ten million) are estimated to have suffered arrest, prosecution, imprisonment or deportation. One Hungarian family in three was directly affected.

The kind of society where trust is widespread is likely to be fairly compact and quite homogenous.

En palabras de Sartre: «Ser libre no es hacer lo que uno quiere, sino en querer hacer lo que uno puede».

Why did Communism collapse so precipitously in 1989? We should not indulge the sirens of retrospective determinism, however seductive. Even if Communism was doomed by its inherent absurdities, few predicted the timing and the manner of its going.

Both Fascism and Communism thrived on social despair, on the huge gulf separating rich and poor. If the democracies were to recover, the 'condition of the people' question must be addressed. In the words of Thomas Carlyle a hundred years earlier, 'if something be not done, something will do itself one day, and in a fashion that will please nobody.

For most Europeans World War Two was experienced not as a war of movement and battle but as a daily degradation, in the course of which men and women were betrayed and humiliated, forced into daily acts of petty crime and self-abasement, in which everyone lost something and many lost everything.

Healthcare reform is a paradigmatic case. It is self-evidently necessary and inevitable and has been on the agenda for 35 years, and the political class seems completely unable to respond to it.

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.

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.

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

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

I don't believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The historian's task is not to disrupt for the sake of it, but it is to tell what is almost always an uncomfortable story and explain why the discomfort is part of the truth we need to live well and live properly. A well organized society is one in which we know the truth about ourselves collectively, not one in which we tell pleasant lies about ourselves.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The moral courage required to hold a different view and to press it upon irritated readers or unsympathetic listeners remains everywhere in short supply.