Tony Judt
Tony Judt
Tony Robert Judt, FBA 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...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionHistorian
Date of Birth2 January 1948
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.
Today, neither Left nor Right can find their footing.
If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have
If active or concerned citizens forfeit politics, they thereby abandon their society to its most mediocre and venal public servants
All modern U.S. presidents are perforce politicians, prisoners of their past pronouncements, their party, their constituency, and their colleagues.
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.
I don't much mind being expelled from communities.
I don't believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action.
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 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 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.
How should we begin to make amends for raising a generation obsessed with the pursuit of material wealth and indifferent to so much else?
History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.
But I'm English. We don't do uplifting.