Quotes from 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.

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

Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so?

I believe that if we think back to the period from F.D.R. through, let us say, Bush I, until the end of the Cold War, we lived through an artificial period in which American interests and European interests essentially dovetailed.

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.

There is nothing to be said for being crippled. You don't see the world better or clearer, nor do you develop some special set of skills by way of compensation.

It does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel.

No one wants to live in a wheelchair unable to talk, only winking once for yes and twice for no. It's perfectly reasonable that there will come a point where the balance of judgment of life over death swings the other way.

I'm regarded outside New York University as a looney tunes leftie, self-hating Jewish communist; inside the university, I'm regarded as a typical, old-fashioned, white male liberal elitist. I like that. I'm on the edge of both; it makes me feel comfortable.

History can show you that it was one pile of bad stuff after another. It can also show you that there's been tremendous progress in knowledge, behaviour, laws, civilisation. It cannot show you that there was a meaning behind it.

I do think we're on the edge of a terrifying world, and that many young people know that but don't know how to talk about it.

What has gone catastrophically wrong in England and the States is that for 30 years we've lost the ability to talk about the state in positive terms. We've raised a generation or two of young people who don't think to ask, 'What can the state do that is good?'

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

I started work on my first French history book in 1969; on 'Socialism in Provence' in 1974; and on the essays in Marxism and the French Left in 1978. Conversely, my first non-academic publication, a review in the 'TLS', did not come until the late 1980s, and it was not until 1993 that I published my first piece in the 'New York Review.'

Reality is a powerful solvent.

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.

Popularizing - much less venturing beyond one's secure turf - was frowned upon for many years. I think I probably internalized the prohibition, even though I was - and knew I was - among the best speakers and writers of my age cohort. I don't mean I was the best historian - a quite different measure.

What an enormous longing for a new human order there was in the era between the world wars, and what a miserable failure to live up to it.'(Arthur Koestler)

Thinking 'economistically', as we have done now for thirty years, is not intrinsic to humans.

Silence over Europe's recent past was the necessary condition for the construction of a European future.

There were no disagreements in Stalin's universe, only heresies; no critics, only enemies; no errors, only crimes. The trials served both to illustrate Stalin's virtues and identify his enemies' crimes. They also illuminate the extent of Stalin's paranoia and the culture of suspicion that surrounded him.

Elio Vittorini observed in 1957 that ever since Napoleon, France had proved impermeable to any foreign influence except German philosophy: and that was still true two decades later... By the time German philosophy had passed through Parisian social thought into English cultural criticism, its difficult vocabulary had achieved a level of expressive opacity that proved irresistible to a new generation of students.

All modern U.S. presidents are perforce politicians, prisoners of their past pronouncements, their party, their constituency, and their colleagues.

dialectics, as a veteran communist explained . . . 'is the art and technique of always landing on your feet.