Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Tony Judt, fully Tony Robert Judt

British Historian, Essayist and University Professor Who Specialized In European History

"A cigar is as good as memories that you have when you smoked it."

"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."

"A logic proof is: you get a starting point and an ending point, and you have to get there through all these different steps and tautologies. I approach novel writing that way. When I get to the end I have to go back and connect everything."

"A political class deeply sensitive to its moral and social responsibilities."

"A handful of individual football stars?not necessarily the most talented, but those boasting good looks, beautiful wives and an animated private life?assumed a role in European public life and popular newspapers hitherto reserved for movie starlets or minor royalty. When David Beckham (an English player of moderate technical gifts but an unsurpassed talent for self-promotion) moved from Manchester United to Real Madrid in 2003, it made headline television news in every member-state of the European Union. Beckham?s embarrassing performance at the European Football Championships in Portugal the following year?the England captain missed two penalties, hastening his country?s ignominious early departure?did little to dampen the enthusiasm of his fans."

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

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

"After Greece, Portugal, rural Spain, southern Italy, and the former Communist L„nder of Germany, the UK in 2000 was the largest beneficiary of European Union structural funds?which is a way of saying that parts of Britain were among the most deprived regions of the EU."

"All around us we see a level of individual wealth unequaled since the early years of the 20th century."

"Above all, the new Left-- and its overwhelmingly youthful constituency -- rejected the inherited collectivism of its predecessor. To an earlier generation of reformers from Washington to Stockholm, it had been self-evident that 'justice', 'equal opportunity' or 'economic security' were shared objectives that could only be attained by common action. A younger cohort saw things very differently. Social justice no longer preoccupied radicals. What united the '60s generation was not the interest of all, but the needs and rights of each. 'Individualism' - the assertion of every person's claims to maximized private freedom and the unrestrained liberty to express autonomous desires and have them respected and institutionalized by society at large - became the left-wing watchword of the hour. Doing 'your own thing', 'letting it all hang out', 'making love, not war': these are not inherently unappealing goals, but they are not of their essence private objectives, not public goods. Unsurprisingly, they led to the widespread assertion that 'the personal is political'."

"All change is disruptive. We have seen that the specter of terrorism is enough to cast stable democracies into turmoil. Climate change will have even more dramatic consequences. Men and women will be thrown back upon the resources of the state. They will look to their political leaders and representatives to protect them: open societies will once again be urged to close in upon themselves, sacrificing freedom for ?security?. The choice will no longer be between the state and the market, but between two sorts of state. It is thus incumbent upon us to re-conceive the role of government. If we do not, others will."

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

"All collective undertakings require trust. From the games that children play to complex social institutions, humans cannot work together unless they suspend their judgments of one another."

"All five were profoundly shaken by the interwar catastrophe that struck their native Austria."

"All my life I've been rather upfront with my opinions and never hidden them on grounds of conformity or (I fear) politesse. However, until the wretched Polish consulate affair, I don't think I was ever controversial?I was certainly not known outside of the hermetic little world of the academy, and my contrarian scholarly writings aroused no great fuss."

"All modern U.S. presidents are perforce politicians, prisoners of their past pronouncements, their party, their constituency, and their colleagues."

"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."

"An older generation of free market economists used to point out that what is wrong with socialist planning is that it requires the sort of perfect knowledge (of present and future alike) that is never vouchsafed to ordinary mortals. They were right. But it transpires that the same is true for market theorists:"

"And few can deny that welfarism, taken to extremes, carries a whiff of do as you?re told!: there were moments in postwar Scandinavia when the enthusiasm for eugenics and social efficiency suggested not just a certain insensitivity to recent history but also to the natural human desire for autonomy and independence."

"Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life."

"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."

"And once we cease to value the public over the private, surely we shall come in time to have difficulty seeing just why we should value law (the public good par excellence) over force."

"As a consequence, the thick mesh of social interactions and public goods has been reduced to a minimum, with nothing except authority and obedience binding the citizen to the state."

"Ask... what it is about all-embracing 'systems' of thought that leads inexorably to all-embracing 'systems' of rule."

"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."

"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."

"Beginning with a handful of outstanding intellectual refugees from interwar Europe, we pass through two generations of academic economists intent on re-configuring their discipline ? and arrive at the banking, mortgage, private finance and hedge fund scandals of recent years."

"At a certain point, to remain slightly tangential to wherever I was became a way of 'being Tony': by not being anything that everyone else was."

"Behind every cynical (or merely incompetent) banking executive and trader sits an economist, assuring them (and us) from a position of unchallenged intellectual authority that their actions are publicly useful and should in any case not be subject to collective oversight."

"But at least their provision was universal, and for good and ill they were regarded as a public responsibility."

"Beneficiaries of the welfare states whose institutions they call into question, they are all Thatcher?s children: politicians who have overseen a retreat from the ambitions of their predecessors."

"Broken highways, bankrupt cities, collapsing bridges, failed schools, the unemployed, the underpaid and the uninsured: All suggest a collective failure of will."

"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."

"Between 1983 and 2001, mistrustfulness increased markedly in the US, the UK and Ireland."

"But I'm English. We don't do uplifting."

"But the disposition to disagree, to reject and to dissent - however irritating it may be when taken to extremes - is the very lifeblood of an open society. We need people who make a virtue of opposing mainstream opinion. A democracy of permanent consensus will not long remain a democracy."

"But each in its own way was affected by the growing intolerance of immoderate inequality, initiating public provision to compensate for private inadequacy."

"But today, they are everywhere: a token of ?standing?, a shameless acknowledgment of the desire to separate oneself from other members of society, and a formal recognition of the state?s (or the city?s) inability or unwillingness to impose its authority across a uniform public space."

"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."

"By 1945, few people believed any longer in the magic of the market. This was an intellectual revolution. Classical economics mandated a tiny role for the state in economic policymaking."

"By the late 1960s, the idea that nanny knows best was already starting to produce a backlash."

"Conservatism?not to mention the ideological Right?was a minority preference in the decades following World War II."

"By the early ?70s it would have appeared unthinkable to contemplate unraveling the social services, welfare provisions, state-funded cultural and educational resources and much else that people had come to take for granted."

"By the late ?60s, the culture gap separating young people from their parents was perhaps greater than at any point since the early 19th century."

"Convinced that there is little they can do, they do little."

"Contrary to a widespread assumption that has crept back into Anglo-American political jargon, few derive pleasure from handouts: of clothes, shoes, food, rent support or children's school supplies. It is, quite simply, humiliating."

"Contrast 1968, when the CEO of General Motors took home, in pay and benefits, about sixty-six times the amount paid to a typical GM worker. Today the CEO of Wal-Mart earns nine hundred times the wages of his average employee. Indeed, the wealth of the Wal-Mart founder's family in 2005 was estimated at about the same ($90 billion) as that of the bottom 40% of the US population: 120 million people."

"Decline, fear of strangers and an unfamiliar world?is corroding the trust and interdependence on which civil societies rest."

"dialectics, as a veteran communist explained . . . 'is the art and technique of always landing on your feet."

"Democracies in which there are no significant political choices to be made, where economic policy is all that really matters?and where economic policy is now largely determined by nonpolitical actors (central banks, international agencies, or transnational corporations)?must either cease to be functioning democracies or accommodate once again the politics of frustration, of populist resentment."