158 Quotes by Tony Judt

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.

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.

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

The social question is back on the agenda.

A democracy of permanent consensus will not long remain a democracy.

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.

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.

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.

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.