Famous quotes

Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,269 quotes Who coined it · How we decide

English Italiano Polski עברית Français Português فارسی Español 中文 Русский Deutsch العربية हिन्दी 日本語 Ελληνικά Latina

Tony Judt

108 quotes

“My concern tonight is the following: 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 appear to have lost the capacity to question the present, much less offer alternatives to it. Why is it so beyond us to conceive of a different set of arrangements to our common advantage?”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?", New York Review of Books (17 December 2009)
“We don’t live in a world of fixed historical laws that says the—as you describe it—liberal state was born at a particular time, lived and died, and that’s what we’re stuck with. But there are reasons why some things are much harder to retain, to invent, to reinvent than others.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: quoted in "Talking With Tony Judt", The Nation (29 April 2010) by Christine Smallwood
“One of the very few things that I know I believe strongly is that we must learn how to make a better world out of usable pasts rather than dreaming of infinite futures. It’s a very late-Enlightenment view that says that the only way to make a better future is to believe that the future will be better. Smarter people than me used to believe very differently and I think it is time to listen to them once again.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: in Tony Judt: the last interview by Peter Jukes (2010)
“Where does that leave me? Trying, as usual, to square general truths with particular circumstances. That’s the difference between pure ethics and political theory; but it isn’t resolved by simply abandoning the tension and sliding to one end of the pole.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: in Tony Judt: the last interview by Peter Jukes (2010)
“I hate publicity, celebrity, fame, and notoriety, all of which are associated with controversy in its public form. But, in fairness, all my life I've been rather upfront with my opinions and never hidden them on grounds of conformity or (I fear) politesse. However, until the wretched Polish consulate affair, I don't think I was ever controversial—I was certainly not known outside of the hermetic little world of the academy, and my contrarian scholarly writings aroused no great fuss.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: quoted in Evan R. Goldstein, "The Trials of Tony Judt", The Chronicle of Higher Education (6 January 2010)
“I am, I discover in late middle age, a work in progress.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: quoted in Samuel Moyn, "Intellectuals, Reason, and History: In Memory of Tony Judt", H-France Salon (2012)
“History is not written as it was experienced, nor should it be. The inhabitants of the past know better than we do what it was like to live there, but they were not well placed, most of them, to understand what was happening to them and why.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“From the end of World War I until the middle of the middle of the 1970s, French public life was shaped and misshaped by three overlapping and intersecting forms of collective and individual irresponsibility. The first of these was political. Reading the history of interwar France, one is struck again and again by the incompetence, the insouciance and the culpable negligence of the men who governed the country and represented its citizens. This is not a political observation, in the partisan sense, but rather a cultural one.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If the era of political irresponsibility in France lasted from 1918 to 1958, the age of moral irresponsibility may be said to have begun in the mid-thirties and endured for the best part of four decades.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Europe is the smallest continent. It is not really even a continent—just a subcontinental annexe to Asia. The whole of Europe (excluding Russia and Turkey) comprises just five and a half million square kilometers: less than two thirds the area of Brazil, not much more than half the size of China or the US. It is dwarfed by Russia, which covers seventeen million square kilometers. But in the intensity of its internal differences and contrasts, Europe is unique.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Europe is not re-entering its troubled wartime past—on the contrary, it is leaving it. Germany today, like the rest of Europe, is more conscious of its twentieth-century history than at any time in the past fifty years. But this does not mean that it is being drawn back into it. For that history never went away.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sixty years after Hitler's death, his war and its consequences are entering history. Postwar in Europe lasted a very long time, but it is finally coming to a close.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was in the Second World War, then, that the full force of the modern European state was mobilized for the first time, for the primary purpose of conquering and exploiting other Europeans.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The two perspectives—doctrine and calculation—were not necessarily in conflict. Ulbricht and his colleagues certainly believed that the way to expunge Nazism from Germany was by effecting a socio-economic transformation: they were not particularly interested in individual responsibility or moral re-education. But they also understood that Nazism was not just a trick perpetrated on an innocent German proletariat.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The economics of Planning drew directly upon the lessons of the 1930s—a successful strategy for post-war recovery must preclude any return to economic stagnation, depression, protectionism and above all unemployment. The same considerations lay behind the creation of the modern European welfare state. In the conventional wisdom of the 1940s, the political polarizations of the last inter-war decade were born directly of economic depression and its social costs.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The post-1945 urge for change went well beyond the provision of welfare. The years following World War Two were a sort of foreshortened Age of Reform, during which many long-pressing problems were belatedly addressed. One of the most important of these was the matter of agrarian reform, which many well-informed contemporaries saw as Europe's most pressing dilemma.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In fact, Yalta left the truly important issue—arrangements for post-war Germany—off the table precisely because it was so important and intractable. And it is unlikely that the Western leaders could have got a better deal out of Stalin during these last months of the war, even if it had occurred to them to try.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Thus the post-war Bretton Woods system did not come about all at once. The participants at Bretton Woods had anticipated universal international convertibility by the end of the 1940s, but their calculations did not allow for the political and economic consequences of the coming of the Cold War (or, indeed, of the Marshall Plan). Put differently, the high ideals of those setting out plans and institutions for a better international system presumed a stable era of international cooperation from which all would gain.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Stalin himself was famously risk-averse, which is why some commentators then and since regretted the West's failure to exercise 'containment' sooner and further forward. But no-one wanted another war in these years, and whereas Stalin could readily be dissuaded from trying to destabilize Paris or Rome (since he had no armies there), the Soviet presence further east was a non-negotiable affair, as everyone recognized.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It should be clear from this narrative that there is little to be gained from asking 'who started the Cold War?' To the extent that the Cold War was about Germany, the final outcome—a divided country—was probably preferred by all parties to a Germany united against them. No one planned this outcome in May 1945, but few were deeply discontented with it.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Stalin’s calculations were typically indifferent to national variety. Where Communists could reasonably hope to secure power by legal or ostensibly legal means this appears to have been Stalin’s preference, at least through the autumn of 1947. But the point was power, not legality, which is why Communists’ tactics became more confrontational and less embarrassed by judicial or political constraints, even at the cost of alienating foreign sympathy, once it was clear that electoral success would elude them.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Communist state was in a permanent condition of undeclared war against its own citizens. Like Lenin, Stalin understood the need for enemies, and it was in the logic of the Stalinist state that it was constantly mobilizing against its foes—external, but above all domestic.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The intellectual condition of post-war Western Europe would have been unrecognizable to a visitor from even the quite recent past. German-speaking central Europe—the engine room of European culture for the first third of the twentieth century—had ceased to exist.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“‘Anti-Fascism’, with its sub-text of resistance and alliance, was also related to the lingering favorable image of the wartime Soviet Union, the genuine sympathy that many Western Europeans felt for the heroic victors of Kursk and Stalingrad.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Communism excited intellectuals in a way that neither Hitler nor (especially) liberal democracy could hope to match. Communism was exotic in locale and heroic in scale.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This fear of serving anti-Soviet interests was not new. But by the early fifties it was a major calculation in European intellectual debates, above all in France.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If the Left had the wind in its sails and History on its side, then a new generation of Right-wing literati would take pride in being defiant losers, turning the genuine decadence and death-seeking solipsism of inter-war writers like Drieu la Rochelle and Ernst Jünger into a social and sartorial style—thereby anticipating the ‘young fogeys’ of Mrs Thatcher’s Britain.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In cultural matters, the Communists did not even need to take the initiative. Fear of American domination, of the loss of national autonomy and initiative, brought into the ‘progressive’ camp men and women of all political stripes and none.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Communists’ attitude towards their mass movements was strictly instrumental—the Peace Movement was only ever a vehicle for Soviet policy, which is why it suddenly adopted the theme of ‘peaceful co-existence’ in 1951, taking its cue from a shift in Stalin’s international strategy. Privately, Communists—especially in the eastern bloc—had little but scorn for the illusions of their fellow-travellers.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The cultural competition of the early Cold War years was asymmetrical. Among European cultural elites there was still a widespread sentiment that they shared, across ideological divides and even bridging the Iron Curtain, a common culture to which America posed a threat. The French in particular took this line, echoing the early post-war efforts of their diplomats to trace an international policy independent of American control.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Western Europeans owed their newfound well-being to the uncertainties of the Cold War. The internationalization of political confrontations, and the consequent engagement of the United States, helped draw the sting from domestic political conflicts.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The outcome of the Berlin crisis showed that the two Great Powers had more in common than they sometimes appreciated. If Moscow undertook not to raise again the question of Allied status in Berlin, Washington would accept the reality of East German government there and would resist West German pressure for nuclear weapons. Both sides had an interest in stability in central Europe; but more to the point, the US and the USSR were both tired of responding to the demands and complaints of their respective German clients.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No French government except Léon Blum’s short-lived Popular Front of 1936 paid serious attention to the grievous mis-rule practiced by colonial administrators in French North Africa. Moderate Algerian nationalists like Ferhat Abbas were well known to French politicians and intellectuals before and after World War Two, but no-one really expected Paris to concede their modest goals of self-government or ‘home rule’ any time soon.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The 1960s saw the apogee of the European state. The relation of the citizen to the state in Western Europe in the course of the previous century had been a shifting compromise between military needs and political claims: the modern rights of newly enfranchised citizens offset by older obligations to defend the realm. But since 1945 that relationship had come increasingly to be characterised by a dense tissue of social benefits and economic strategies in which it was the state that served its subjects, rather than the other way around.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Moments of great cultural significance are often appreciated only in retrospect. The Sixties were different: the transcendent importance contemporaries attached to their own times—and their own selves—was one of the special features of the age.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But it is symptomatic of the fundamentally apolitical mood of May 1968 that the best-selling French books on the subject a generation later are not serious works of historical analysis, much less the earnest doctrinal tracts of the time, but collections of contemporary graffiti and slogans. Culled from the walls, noticeboards and streets of the city, these witty one-liners encourage young people to make love, have fun, mock those in authority, generally do what feels good—and change the world almost as a by-product.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One immediate result of the economic down-turn was a hardening of attitudes towards ‘foreign’ workers of all sorts. If published unemployment rates in West Germany (close to zero in 1970) did not climb above 8 percent of the labor force despite a slump in demand for manufactured goods, it was because most of the unemployed workers in Germany were not German—and thus not officially recorded.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The greatest beneficiaries of the modern welfare state, after all, were the middle classes.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Eurocommunism was thus a contradiction in terms, despite the best efforts of its spokesmen.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The democratic transition of Mediterranean Europe was quite the most remarkable and unexpected development of the age.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every politically significant revolution is anticipated by a transformation of the intellectual landscape. The European upheavals of the 1980s were no exception. The economic crisis of the early Seventies undermined the optimism of Western Europe’s post-war decades, fracturing conventional political parties and propelling unfamiliar issues to the center of public debate. Political argument on both sides of the Cold War divide was breaking decisively with decades of encrusted mental habits—and, with unexpected speed, forming new ones. For better and for worse, a new realism was being born.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Behind the long ‘Social-Democratic moment’ in Western Europe there had lain not just pragmatic faith in the public sector, or allegiance to Keynesian economic principles, but a sense of the shape of the age that influenced and for many decades stifled even its would-be critics.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The American President’s publicly-aired caution is a further salutary reminder of the limited part played by the USA in these developments. Pace the self-congratulatory narrative that has entered the American public record, Washington did not ‘bring down’ Communism—Communism imploded of its own accord.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Uncontentious decisions were typically made in Brussels by experts and civil servants. Policies likely to affect significant electoral constituencies or national interests were hammered out in the Council of Ministers and produced complicated compromises or else expensive deals. Whatever could not be resolved or agreed was simply left in abeyance. The dominant member states—Britain, Germany and above all France—could not always count on getting what they wanted; but whatever they truly did not want did not come to pass.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In contrast to the United States, which continued to treat ‘Islam’ and Muslims as a distant challenge, alien and hostile, best addressed by heightened security and ‘pre-emptive war’, Europe’s governments had good reason to see the matter very differently. In France especially, the crisis in the Middle East was no longer a matter of foreign policy: it had become a domestic problem. The transmigration of passions and frustrations from persecuted Arabs in Palestine to their angry, dispirited brethren in Paris should not have come as a surprise—it was, after all, another legacy of empire.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We have entered an age of insecurity—economic insecurity, physical insecurity, political insecurity. The fact that we are largely unaware of this is small comfort: few in 1914 predicted the utter collapse of their world and the economic and political catastrophes that followed. Insecurity breeds fear. And fear—fear of change, fear of decline, fear of strangers and an unfamiliar world—is corroding the trust and interdependence on which civil societies rest.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Inequality is corrosive. It rots societies from within. The impact of material differences takes a while to show up: but in due course competition for status and goods increases; people feel a growing sense of superiority (or inferiority) based on their possessions; prejudice towards those on the lower ranks of the social ladder hardens; crime spikes and the pathologies of social disadvantage become ever more marked. The legacy of unregulated wealth creation is bitter indeed.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The ‘false precision’ of which Maynard Keynes accused his economist critics is with us still. Worse: we have smuggled in a misleadingly ‘ethical’ vocabulary to bolster our economic arguments, furnishing us with a self-satisfied gloss upon crassly utilitarian calculations. When imposing welfare cuts on the poor, for example, legislators in the UK and US alike have taken a singular pride in the ‘hard choices’ they have had to make.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The past was neither as good nor as bad as we suppose: it was just different. If we tell ourselves nostalgic stories, we shall never engage the problems that face us in the present—and the same is true if we fondly suppose that our own world is better in every way. The past really is another country: we cannot go back. However, there is something worse than idealizing the past—or presenting it to ourselves and our children as a chamber of horrors: forgetting it.”
Tony Judt (1948–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source