Skip to content

Life Quote by Tony Judt

““I prefer the edge: the place where countries, communities, allegiances, affinities, and roots bump uncomfortably up against one another—where cosmopolitanism is not so much an identity as the normal condition of life. Such places once abounded. Well into the twentieth century there were many cities comprising multiple communities and languages—often mutually antagonistic, occasionally clashing, but somehow coexisting. Sarajevo was one, Alexandria another. Tangiers, Salonica, Odessa, Beirut, and Istanbul all qualified—as did smaller towns like Chernovitz and Uzhhorod. By the standards of American conformism, New York resembles aspects of these lost cosmopolitan cities: that is why I live here.””

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 3.3 out of 5 (8 ratings)

Life Patriotism

More by Tony Judt

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…

Image

“Markets do not automatically generate trust, cooperation or collective action for the common good. Quite the contrary: it is in the nature of economic…

Image

“ Lieux de memoire . . . 'exist because there are no longer any milieux de memoire , settings in which memory is a…

Image

“Keynes died in 1946, exhausted by his wartime efforts. But he had long since demonstrated that neither capitalism nor liberalism would survive very long without one another. And since the experience of the interwar years had clearly revealed the inability of capitalists to protect their own best interests, the liberal state would have to do it for them whether they…

The Second World War had a precipitating effect in that it discredited the empires, as well as bankrupting them. Not only could you no longer, if you were a colonial subject of France in Africa, look to France as a model of power and influence and civility after what had happened in the war. Nor could the French any longer…

“That the state might exceed its remit and damage the market by distorting its operations was not taken very seriously in these years.”

Image

“Whatever their other differences, French Gaullists, Christian Democrats and Socialists shared a common faith in the activist state, economic planning and large-scale public investment.…

Image

I think if I'm controversial it's not because I set out to be. It's because I've never felt comfortable being part of someone else's…

Image

“This reduction of 'society' to a thin membrane of interactions between private individuals is presented today as the ambition of libertarians and free marketeers. But we should never forget that it was first and above all the dream of Jacobins, Bolsheviks and Nazis: if there is nothing that binds us together as a community or society, then we are utterly…

“Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material…

Image

“Today, neither Left nor Right can find their footing.”

Image

We have responsibilities for others, not just across space but across time. We have responsibilities to people who came before us. They left us…

Image

Explore all 211 Tony Judt quotes

More Life quotes

Of all the people who have affected my life and influenced the choices I've made, none has been more important than my father. I…

Image

What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions. Life is plurality, death is uniformity. By suppressing differences and pecularities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death. The ideal of a single civilization for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress and technique, impoverishes and mutilates us. Every view of…

Life is full of change. That's how we learn and grow.

Image

Life works most perfectly when a reciprocal love relationship is in place between man and God.

Image

I value the experiences that come with life too much to sit by and not put my full effort into them.

Image

Entertainment is a sacred pursuit when done well. When done well, it raises the quality of human life.

Image

“There's more to life than you can see. Your sight is limited.”

Image

“I've spent much of my life calling my intuition "something wrong with me.”

Deanna L. Lawlis

Image

When you do things they're absolutely right at that time for you and it can always teach you something about yourself. You can take…

Image

The only people who think the Internet is a calamity are people whose lives have been hurt by it; the only people who insist…

Chuck Klosterman

Image

The one thing that I keep learning over and over again is that I don't know nothing. I mean, that's my life lesson.

Image

“THIS tale of my sore-troubled life I write, To thank the God of nature, who conveyed My soul to me, and with such care…

Image

Browse all 265,426 Life quotes