Quotes by Tony Judt

About Tony Judt:

Tony Robert Judt was a British historian, essayist, and university professor who specialized in European history. Judt moved to New York and served as the Erich Maria Remarque Professor in European Studies at New York University, and Director of NYU's Erich Maria Remarque Institute. He was a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books. In 1996 Judt was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2007 a corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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.

Tony Judt

The people whose necks hurt when I write about the Middle East tend to live in Brooklyn or Boca Raton: the kind of Zionist who pays another man to live in Israel for him. I have nothing but contempt for such people.

Tony Judt

Judaism for me is a sensibility of collective self-questioning and uncomfortable truth-telling. I feel a debt of responsibility to this past. It is why I am Jewish.

Tony Judt

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

Tony Judt

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

Tony Judt

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

Tony Judt

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

Tony Judt

Reality is a powerful solvent.

Tony Judt

We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.

Tony Judt

I don't much mind being expelled from communities.

Tony Judt

Obviously a primary liberal conviction is that we should be tolerant of other peoples' convictions. But if we believe in something, we had better find ways to say so convincingly.

Tony Judt

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.

Tony Judt

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.

Tony Judt

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.

Tony Judt

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.

Tony Judt

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.

Tony Judt

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 Europe...

Tony Judt

I started work on my first French history book in 1969; on 'Socialism in Provence' in 1974; and on the essays in Marxism and the French Left in 1978. Conversely, my first non-academic publication, a review in the 'TLS', did not come until the late 19...

Tony Judt

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

Tony Judt

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.

Tony Judt

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

Tony Judt

Author Bio

  • NameTony Judt
  • DescriptionBritish historian
  • BornJanuary 2, 1948
  • DiedAugust 6, 2010
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionHistorian; Author
  • AwardsHannah Arendt Prize