Top 90 Tony Judt Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I’ve lost count of the interviews I’ve done about my illness and its relationship to my ideas and writing.”

— Tony Judt

52. “Reality is a powerful solvent.”

— Tony Judt

53. “The Socialist social contract was tartly summed up in the popular joke: ‘you pretend to work, we pretend to pay you’. Many workers, especially the less-skilled, had a stake in these arrangements, which – in return for political quiescence – offered social security and a low level of pressure at the workplace. As East Germany’s official Small Political Dictionary put it, with unintended irony, ‘in socialism, the contradiction between work and free time, typical of capitalism, is removed.’ The.”

— Tony Judt

54. “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

55. “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

56. “What is the measurable cost of depriving isolated citizens of access to metropolitan resources? How much are we willing to pay for a good society?”

— Tony Judt

57. “How should we begin to make amends for raising a generation obsessed with the pursuit of material wealth and indifferent to so much else? Perhaps we might start by reminding ourselves and our children that it wasn’t always thus.”

— Tony Judt

58. “The disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despite, or, at least, to neglect, persons of poor and mean condition is the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.”

— Tony Judt

59. “If we remain grotesquely unequal, we shall lose all sense of fraternity: and fraternity, for all its fatuity as a political objective, turns out to be the necessary condition of politics itself.”

— Tony Judt

60. “After 1945 what happened was rather the opposite: with one major exception boundaries stayed broadly intact and people were moved instead.”

— Tony Judt

61. “We must distinguish better than some of our predecessors between desirable ends and unacceptable means.”

— Tony Judt

62. “The Iraq war saw the overwhelming majority of British and American public commentators abandon all pretense at independent thought and toe the government line.”

— Tony Judt

63. “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.”

— Tony Judt

64. “But republics and democracies exist only by virtue of the engagement of their citizens in the management of public affairs. If active or concerned citizens forfeit politics, they thereby abandon their society to its most mediocre and venal public servants.”

— Tony Judt

65. “During the long century of constitutional liberalism, from Gladstone to LBJ, Western democracies were led by a distinctly superior class of statesmen.”

— Tony Judt

66. “We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.”

— Tony Judt

67. “However, poverty – whether measured by infant mortality, life expectancy, access to medicine and regular employment or simple inability to purchase basic necessities – has increased steadily since the 1970s.”

— Tony Judt

68. “The social question is back on the agenda.”

— Tony Judt

69. “Why are we so sure that some planning, or progressive taxation, or the collective ownership of public goods, are intolerable restrictions on liberty; whereas closed-circuit television cameras, state bailouts for investment banks ‘too big to fail’, tapped telephones and expensive foreign wars are acceptable burdens for a free people to bear?”

— Tony Judt

70. “Keynes knew perfectly well that fascist economic policy could never have succeeded in the long-run without war, occupation and exploitation.”

— Tony Judt

71. “Silence over Europe’s recent past was the necessary condition for the construction of a European future.”

— Tony Judt

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

— Tony Judt

73. “Without idealism, politics is reduced to a form of social accounting, the day-to-day administration of men and things. This too is something that a conservative can survive well enough. But for the Left it is a catastrophe.”

— Tony Judt

74. “Why does this matter? Because – as the Greeks knew – participation in the way you are governed not only heightens a collective sense of responsibility for the things government does, it also keeps our rulers honest and holds authoritarian excess at bay.”

— Tony Judt

75. “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.”

— Tony Judt

76. “The characteristic tone of the ’60s was that of overweening confidence: we knew just how to fix the world. It was this note of unmerited arrogance that partly accounts for the reactionary backlash that followed; if the Left is to recover its fortunes, some modesty will be in order.”

— Tony Judt

77. “The military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of its totality.”

— Tony Judt

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

— Tony Judt

79. “What, then, should we have learned from 1989? Perhaps, above all, that nothing is either necessary or inevitable.”

— Tony Judt

80. “In September 1944 there were 7,487,000 foreigners in Germany, most of them there against their will, and they constituted 21 percent of the country’s labour force.”

— Tony Judt

81. “As in the past, therefore, eastern Europeans have had to compete with the West on a markedly uneven playing field, lacking local capital and foreign markets and able to export only low-margin foods and raw materials or else industrial and consumer goods kept cheap thanks to low wages and public subsidy.”

— Tony Judt

82. “Undergraduates today can select from a swathe of identity studies... The shortcoming of all these para-academic programs is not that they concentrate on a given ethnic or geographical minority; it is that they encourage members of that minority to study themselves – thereby simultaneously negating the goals of a liberal education and reinforcing the sectarian and ghetto mentalities they purport to undermine.”

— Tony Judt

83. “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. And since the experience of the interwar years had clearly revealed the inability of capitalists to protect their own best interests, the liberal eral state would have to do it for them whether they liked it or not.”

— Tony Judt

84. “Broadly speaking, affairs that were urgently political in Europe aroused only intellectual interest in Britain; while topics of intellectual concern on the Continent were usually confined to academic circles in the UK, if indeed they were noticed at all. The.”

— Tony Judt

85. “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 European societies.”

— Tony Judt

86. “Markets do not automatically generate trust, cooperation or collective action for the common good. Quite the contrary: it is in the nature of economic competition that a participant who breaks the rules will triumph – at least in the short run – over more ethically sensitive competitors.”

— Tony Judt

87. “True, many radicals of the ’60s were quite enthusiastic supporters of imposed choices, but only when these affected distant peoples of whom they knew little.”

— Tony Judt

88. “In the eyes of Hayek and his contemporaries, the European tragedy had thus been brought about by the shortcomings of the Left: first through its inability to achieve its objectives and then thanks to its failure to withstand the challenge from the Right. Each of them, albeit in different ways, arrived at the same conclusion: the best – indeed the only – way to defend liberalism and an open society was to keep the state out of economic life.”

— Tony Judt

89. “As recently as the 1970s, the idea that the point of life was to get rich and that governments existed to facilitate this would have been ridiculed: not only by capitalism’s traditional critics but also by many of its staunchest defenders.”

— Tony Judt

90. “We need to rediscover how to talk about change: how to imagine very different arrangements for ourselves, free of the dangerous cant of ‘revolution’.”

— Tony Judt

91. “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.”

— Tony Judt

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

— Tony Judt

93. “Keynes himself had taken the view that capitalism would not survive if its workings were reduced to merely furnishing the wealthy with the means to get wealthier. It was.”

— Tony Judt

94. “It is perhaps worth noting here that even Hayek cannot be held responsible for the ideological simplifications of his acolytes. Like Keynes, he regarded economics as an interpretive science, not amenable to prediction or precision.”

— Tony Judt