Tony Judt's Quotes

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.

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.

We need to start talking about inequality again; we need to start talking about the inequities and unfairnesses and the injustices of an excessively divided society, divided by wealth, by opportunity, by outcome, by assets and so forth.

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?'

What I am against is false optimism: the notion either that things have to go well, or else that they tend to, or else that the default condition of historical trajectories is characteristically beneficial in the long-run.

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?

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.

Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life.

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.

But I'm English. We don't do uplifting.

History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.

How should we begin to make amends for raising a generation obsessed with the pursuit of material wealth and indifferent to so much else?

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.

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.

I don't believe in an afterlife. I don't believe in a single or multiple godhead. I respect people who do, but I don't believe it myself.

I don't believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action.

I don't much mind being expelled from communities.

I grew up in a world where the social democratic state was the norm, not the exception.

I know exactly how and where I am going to die. The only question is when.

I'm not sure I've learned anything new about life; but I've had to think harder about death and what comes after for other people.

I've lost count of the interviews I've done about my illness and its relationship to my ideas and writing.

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

My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.

Reality is a powerful solvent.

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

The pleasures of mental agility are much overstated, inevitably - as it now appears to me - by those not exclusively dependent upon them.

We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.

When you are in my classroom, you get everything from me. But you bloody well better give everything too.

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

You don't have to be Jewish to understand the history of Europe in the 20th century, but it helps.

I buy a lot of books I've found via the Internet, whose existences I'd otherwise never have known about.

I obviously read and adore traditional fiction. I teach traditional fiction; I also teach all kinds of not-so-traditional fiction.

I spend far too much time on eBay buying lamps and upholstery remnants.

A logic proof is: you get a starting point and an ending point, and you have to get there through all these different steps and tautologies. I approach novel writing that way. When I get to the end I have to go back and connect everything.

During the summers, when I'm in Maine, I work at a desk that's located beyond all tendrilly wi-fi reaches. It takes me a few days to break the constant e-mail-checking habit, then I find I don't want to check my e-mail ever, and often don't for days.

I think female-female relationships interest me so much more because they're so encoded. There is kind of a psychic element that happens within groups of women.

I won't deny that I have a far more productive writing life without the Internet, mostly because I rekindle my ability to concentrate on one thing for a period of longer than three minutes. My curiosity is channeled inward rather than Internet-ward.

Usually I'll write all the way through to an end, and then I go back and try to fix the ending so that it makes sense. I don't think out the plot ahead of time.

Maybe it's like becoming one with the cigar. You lose yourself in it; everything fades away: your worries, your problems, your thoughts. They fade into the smoke, and the cigar and you are at peace.

I even smoke in bed. Imagine smoking a cigar in bed, reading a book. Next to your bed, there's a cigar table with a special cigar ashtray, and your wife is reading a book on how to save the environment.

Why pay $100 on a therapy session when you can spend $25 on a cigar? Whatever it is will come back; so what, smoke another one.

It was a very profound experience, getting in touch with that part of us, in all of us human beings, that is committed beyond yourself to the point of giving everything you have, including your life, for other people, for your fellow man.

A cigar is as good as memories that you have when you smoked it.

I have a very deep care for Latin America, and, of course, for what was going on in El Salvador.

I remember I was like five or six years old; I played the devil. That was my first role.

There are 38,000 people dying of hunger each day and most are children. And, being a celebrity, I communicate about it as much as I can.

Instead of acting in court, I decided to act onstage.

Sometimes we used to eat once a day... chicken backs. You could buy four chicken backs for a quarter.

Thank God for the theater.

We tend to think of meditation in only one way. But life itself is a meditation.

You have to have the right atmosphere, really be in the right mood to really fully enjoy a Cohiba.

I knew there was something special about the theater for me something beyond the regular reality, something that I could get into and transcend and become something other than myself.

Just the fact that I've lived more, and I'm not concerned about when I am going to get my next job anymore. This business is free-lance and it's not a steady job. Younger, I would have been more preoccupied with myself.