Quotes from Tony Judt

the military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of its totality.

Those who got the twentieth century right, whether in anticipation [..] or as contemporary observations, had to be able to imagine a world for which there was no precedent.

Inequality is corrosive. It rots societies from within.

The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

What, then, should we have learned from 1989? Perhaps, above all, that nothing is either necessary or inevitable.

A closed circle of opinion or ideas into which discontent or opposition is never allowed—or allowed only within circumscribed and stylized limits—loses its capacity to respond energetically or imaginatively to new challenges.

triple evils of modernity: Nazism, Communism and 'Americanism'.

Motor scooters appeared on the scene—in France and especially Italy, where the first national motor-scooter rally, held in Rome on November 13th 1949, was followed by an explosive growth in the market for these convenient and reasonably priced symbols of urban freedom and mobility, popular with young people and duly celebrated—the Vespa model in particular—in every contemporary film from or about Italy.

O amor é aquele estado em que somos nós próprios com mais satisfação. O amor consiste em deixar aos amados espaço para que sejam eles próprios ao mesmo tempo que se lhes dá a segurança no seio da qual esse eu possa florescer.

However: the predictable consequence of the nanny state, even the post-ideological nanny state, was that for anyone who had grown up knowing nothing different it was the duty of the state to make good on its promise of an ever better society—and thus the fault of the state when things did not turn out well.

The absence of trust is clearly inimical to a well-run society. The great Jane Jacobs noted as much with respect to the very practical business of urban life and the maintenance of cleanliness and civility on city streets. If we don't trust each other, our towns will look horrible and be nasty places to live. Moreover, she observed, you cannot institutionalize trust. Once corroded, it is virtually impossible to restore.

Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation; thus the progress of historical studies is often a danger for national identity . . . The essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things'. Ernest Renan

Keynes died in 1946, exhausted by his wartime labors. 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 eral state would have to do it for them whether they liked it or not.

In the eyes of Hayek and his contemporaries, the European tragedy had thus been brought about by the shortcomings of the Left: first through its inability to achieve its objectives and then thanks to its failure to withstand the challenge from the Right. Each of them, albeit in different ways, arrived at the same conclusion: the best—indeed the only—way to defend liberalism and an open society was to keep the state out of economic life.

We need to rediscover how to talk about change: how to imagine very different arrangements for ourselves, free of the dangerous cant of 'revolution'.

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.

But republics and democracies exist only by virtue of the engagement of their citizens in the management of public affairs. If active or concerned citizens forfeit politics, they thereby abandon their society to its most mediocre and venal public servants.

Edmund Burke in his critique of the French Revolution. Any society, he wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in France, which destroys the fabric of its state, must soon be "disconnected into the dust and powder of individuality".

Our problem is to work out a social organization which shall be as efficient as possible without offending our notions of a satisfactory way of life." —JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

A democracy of permanent consensus will not long remain a democracy.

What is the measurable cost of depriving isolated citizens of access to metropolitan resources? How much are we willing to pay for a good society?

War, in short, concentrated the mind. It had proven possible to convert a whole country into a war machine around a war economy; why then, people asked, could something similar not be accomplished in pursuit of peace? There was no convincing answer.

However, poverty—whether measured by infant mortality, life expectancy, access to medicine and regular employment or simple inability to purchase basic necessities—has increased steadily since the 1970s

The social question is back on the agenda.