Tony Judt Quotes - Page 3

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.

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.

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

I don't much mind being expelled from communities.

If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have

I don't believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action.

I know exactly how and where I am going to die. The only question is when.

It might be thought the height of poor taste to ascribe good fortune to a healthy man with a young family struck down at the age of sixty by an incurable degenerative disorder from which he must shortly die. But there is more than one sort of luck. To fall prey to a motor neuron disease is surely to have offended the Gods at some point, and there is nothing more to be said. But if you must suffer thus, better to have a well-stocked head.

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

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.

It does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel.

There is nothing to be said for being crippled. You don't see the world better or clearer, nor do you develop some special set of skills by way of compensation.

I was born accidentally. I lived accidentally in London. We nearly migrated to New Zealand. So much of my life has been a product of chance, I can't see a meaning in it at all.