Tony Judt

You don't have to be Jewish to understand the history of Europe in the 20th century, but it helps.

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.

Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so?

I went to live on a kibbutz, and I'd idealized the world of collective, agrarian work, where everyone was equal, everyone contributed, that all this awful European intellectual stuff just fell away.

Social democracy does not represent an ideal future; it does not even represent the ideal past.