Tony Judt People Quotations

What has gone catastrophically wrong in England and the States is that for 30 years we've lost the ability to talk about the state in positive terms. We've raised a generation or two of young people who don't think to ask, 'What can the state do that is good?'

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.

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

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

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 it myself.

I do think we're on the edge of a terrifying world, and that many young people know that but don't know how to talk about it.

I'm not sure I've learned anything new about life; but I've had to think harder about death and what comes after for other people.