Quotes from Tony Judt

But precisely because history is not foreordained, we mere mortals must invent it as we go along—and in circumstances, as old Marx rightly pointed out, not entirely of our own making. We shall have to ask the perennial questions again, but be open to different answers.

Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives.

Lieux de memoire . . . 'exist because there are no longer any milieux de memoire , settings in which memory is a real part of everyday experience.' And what are lieux de memoire ? [They] are . . . vestiges . . . the rituals of a ritual-less society.

Whatever Americans fondly believe, their government has always had its fingers in the economic pie. What distinguishes the USA from every other developed country has been the widespread belief to the contrary.

If it is to be taken seriously again, the Left must find its voice. There is much to be angry about: growing inequalities of wealth and opportunity; injustices of class and caste; economic exploitation at home and abroad; corruption and money and privilege occluding the arteries of democracy.

The only thing worse than too much government is too little: in failed states, people suffer at least as much violence and injustice as under authoritarian rule, and in addition their trains do not run on time.

Finding a homeland is not the same as dwelling in the place where our ancestors once used to live."   —KRZYSZTOF CZYZEWSKI

in a constitutionally ordered state, where laws are derived from broad principles of right and wrong and where those principles are enshrined and protected by agreed upon procedures and practices, it can never be in the long-term interest of the state or its citizens to flout those procedures at home or associate too closely overseas with the enemies of your founding ideals.

Loss is loss, and nothing is gained by calling it by a nicer name.

Love, it seems to me, is the condition in which one is most contentedly oneself.

ask . . . what it is about all-embracing 'systems' of thought that leads inexorably to all-embracing 'systems' of rule.

Today, neither Left nor Right can find their footing.

We must distinguish better than some of our predecessors between desirable ends and unacceptable means.

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.

Words can make the illness a subject I can master, and not one that one simply emotes over.

I was born in 1948, so I'm a '60s kid, and in the '60s everyone talked all the time, endlessly, about socialism versus capitalism, about political choices, ideology, Marxism, revolution, 'the system' and so on.

I can still boss people around. I can still write. I can still read. I can still eat, and I can still have very strong views.

Social democrats are characteristically modest - a political quality whose virtues are overestimated. We need to apologise a little less for our shortcomings and speak more assertively of achievements. That these were always incomplete should not trouble us.