Top 90 Tony Judt Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If active or concerned citizens forfeit politics, they thereby abandon their society to its most mediocre and venal public servants.”

— Tony Judt

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

— Tony Judt

3. “We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.”

— Tony Judt

4. “Inequality is corrosive. It rots societies from within.”

— Tony Judt

5. “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

6. “Love consists in leaving the loved one space to be themselves while providing the security within which that self may flourish.”

— Tony Judt

7. “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.”

— Tony Judt

8. “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.”

— Tony Judt

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

— Tony Judt

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

— Tony Judt

11. “A democracy of permanent consensus will not long remain a democracy.”

— Tony Judt

12. “War, in short, concentrated the mind. It had proven possible to convert a whole country into a war machine around a war economy; why then, people asked, could something similar not be accomplished in pursuit of peace? There was no convincing answer.”

— Tony Judt

13. “But I’m English. We don’t do uplifting.”

— Tony Judt

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

— Tony Judt

15. “I don’t much mind being expelled from communities.”

— Tony Judt

16. “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.”

— Tony Judt

17. “Edmund Burke in his critique of the French Revolution. Any society, he wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in France, which destroys the fabric of its state, must soon be “disconnected into the dust and powder of individuality”.”

— Tony Judt

18. “Broken eggs make good omelettes. But you cannot build a better society on broken men.”

— Tony Judt

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

— Tony Judt

20. “If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have.”

— Tony Judt

21. “Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives.”

— Tony Judt

22. “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.”

— Tony Judt

23. “Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.”

— Tony Judt

24. “There were no disagreements in Stalin’s universe, only heresies; no critics, only enemies; no errors, only crimes. The trials served both to illustrate Stalin’s virtues and identify his enemies’ crimes. They also illuminate the extent of Stalin’s paranoia and the culture of suspicion that surrounded him.”

— Tony Judt

25. “Today, neither Left nor Right can find their footing.”

— Tony Judt

26. “Selfishness is uncomfortable even for the selfish. Hence the rise of gated communities: the privileged don’t like to be reminded of their privileges – if these carry morally dubious connotations.”

— Tony Judt

27. “Our disability is discursive: we simply do not know how to talk about these things any more. For the last thirty years, when asking ourselves whether we support a policy, a proposal or an initiative, we have restricted ourselves to issues of profit and loss – economic questions in the narrowest sense. But this is not an instinctive human condition: it is an acquired taste.”

— Tony Judt

28. “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.”

— Tony Judt

29. “If we don’t respect public goods; if we permit or encourage the privatization of public space, resources and services; if we enthusiastically support the propensity of a younger generation to look exclusively to their own needs: then we should not be surprised to find a steady falling-away from civic engagement in public decision-making.”

— Tony Judt

30. “Love, it seems to me, is the condition in which one is most contentedly oneself.”

— Tony Judt

31. “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.”

— Tony Judt

32. “However: the predictable consequence of the nanny state, even the post-ideological nanny state, was that for anyone who had grown up knowing nothing different it was the duty of the state to make good on its promise of an ever better society – and thus the fault of the state when things did not turn out well.”

— Tony Judt

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

— Tony Judt

34. “The absence of trust is clearly inimical to a well-run society. The great Jane Jacobs noted as much with respect to the very practical business of urban life and the maintenance of cleanliness and civility on city streets. If we don’t trust each other, our towns will look horrible and be nasty places to live. Moreover, she observed, you cannot institutionalize trust. Once corroded, it is virtually impossible to restore.”

— Tony Judt

35. “People who live in private spaces contribute actively to the dilution and corrosion of the public space. In other words, they exacerbate the circumstances which drove them to retreat in the first place.”

— Tony Judt

36. “Elio Vittorini observed in 1957 that ever since Napoleon, France had proved impermeable to any foreign influence except German philosophy: and that was still true two decades later... By the time German philosophy had passed through Parisian social thought into English cultural criticism, its difficult vocabulary had achieved a level of expressive opacity that proved irresistible to a new generation of students.”

— Tony Judt

37. “The victory of conservatism and the profound transformation brought about over the course of the next three decades was thus far from inevitable: it took an intellectual revolution.”

— Tony Judt

38. “Thinking ‘economistically’, as we have done now for thirty years, is not intrinsic to humans.”

— Tony Judt

39. “The historian’s task is not to disrupt for the sake of it, but it is to tell what is almost always an uncomfortable story and explain why the discomfort is part of the truth we need to live well and live properly. A well organized society is one in which we know the truth about ourselves collectively, not one in which we tell pleasant lies about ourselves.”

— Tony Judt

40. “The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”

— Tony Judt

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

— Tony Judt

42. “If it is to be taken seriously again, the Left must find its voice. There is much to be angry about: growing inequalities of wealth and opportunity; injustices of class and caste; economic exploitation at home and abroad; corruption and money and privilege occluding the arteries of democracy.”

— Tony Judt

43. “But precisely because history is not foreordained, we mere mortals must invent it as we go along – and in circumstances, as old Marx rightly pointed out, not entirely of our own making. We shall have to ask the perennial questions again, but be open to different answers.”

— Tony Judt

44. “Keynes died in 1946, exhausted by his wartime labors. But he had long since demonstrated that neither capitalism nor liberalism would survive very long without one another.”

— Tony Judt

45. “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

46. “I don’t believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action.”

— Tony Judt

47. “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

48. “A closed circle of opinion or ideas into which discontent or opposition is never allowed – or allowed only within circumscribed and stylized limits – loses its capacity to respond energetically or imaginatively to new challenges.”

— Tony Judt

49. “Motor scooters appeared on the scene – in France and especially Italy, where the first national motor-scooter rally, held in Rome on November 13th 1949, was followed by an explosive growth in the market for these convenient and reasonably priced symbols of urban freedom and mobility, popular with young people and duly celebrated – the Vespa model in particular – in every contemporary film from or about Italy.”

— Tony Judt

50. “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.”

— Tony Judt