158 Quotes by Tony Judt

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

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

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

Inequality is corrosive. It rots societies from within.

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.

I don’t much mind being expelled from communities.

I’ve lost count of the interviews I’ve done about my illness and its relationship to my ideas and writing.

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.

But I’m English. We don’t do uplifting.