British - Historian | January 2, 1948 - August 6, 2010
Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life.
Tony Judt
LifeYouEverythingLineIsrael
For Europe to play a part in the world on the scale of its wealth and its population and its capacities, Europe has to be united in some way, and Europe is not united.
WorldWealthPlayWayEuropeUnited
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.
FutureMePicturePoliticalFall
As citizens of a free society, we have a duty to look critically at our world. But if we think we know what is wrong, we must act upon that knowledge.
KnowledgeWorldSocietyFreeThink
How should we begin to make amends for raising a generation obsessed with the pursuit of material wealth and indifferent to so much else?
GenerationWealthBeginPursuitMuch
The pleasures of mental agility are much overstated, inevitably - as it now appears to me - by those not exclusively dependent upon them.
MeNowMentalAgilityPleasures
We need to learn... how war brutalises and degrades winners and losers alike and what happens to us when, having heedlessly waged war for no good reason, we are encouraged to inflate and demonise our enemies in order to justify that war's indefinite continuance.
GoodWarLearnWinnersNeedReason
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.
TimeSpacePeopleIdeasWorldTurn
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.
LifeFamilyMeThinkGivingWant
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.
QualitySpeakPoliticalTroubleNeed
If we have learned nothing else from the 20th century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences. Incremental improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for, and probably all we should seek.
HopeBestConsequencesPerfectMore
At a certain point, to remain slightly tangential to wherever I was became a way of 'being Tony': by not being anything that everyone else was.
WayEveryonePointAnythingWherever
Copyright © 2024 QuotesDict Tony Judt quotes