British - Historian | January 2, 1948 - August 6, 2010
I went to live on a kibbutz, and I'd idealized the world of collective, agrarian work, where everyone was equal, everyone contributed, that all this awful European intellectual stuff just fell away.
Tony Judt
WorkLiveWorldIntellectualEqual
I think if I'm controversial it's not because I set out to be. It's because I've never felt comfortable being part of someone else's mainstream community.
CommunityThinkSomeoneNeverOut
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.
New YorkMeFeelWhiteEdgeNew
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.
KnowledgeHistoryProgressMeaning
I was born accidentally. I lived accidentally in London. We nearly migrated to New Zealand. So much of my life has been a product of chance, I can't see a meaning in it at all.
LifeChanceMy LifeMeaningBorn
Words can make the illness a subject I can master, and not one that one simply emotes over.
WordsI CanOverMasterIllness
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.
WarColdBelieveThinkEndAmerican
American social arrangements, economic arrangements, the degree of inequality in American life, the relatively small role played by the government in American public life and so forth, compares to exactly the opposite conditions in most of the European societies.
LifeGovernmentSmallAmericanRole
I think Bush was seen as someone who was disentangling America from the connections that it had with the outside world, that it found encumbering for domestic purposes.
WorldThinkConnectionsSomeoneSeen
I've lost count of the interviews I've done about my illness and its relationship to my ideas and writing.
RelationshipIdeasWritingLostDone
I know exactly how and where I am going to die. The only question is when.
I AmDieKnowQuestionWhereGoing
When you are in my classroom, you get everything from me. But you bloody well better give everything too.
MeBetterYouClassroomEverything
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