Tony Judt Quotes

When my generation grew up, our only sources of knowledge were books, teachers, parents and friends. The encyclopedia was an item of luxury. We faced big limits in what we could learn, where we could be and who we could reach.

When I went to college, my goal was to be a college history teacher. I majored in history.

When you tell people you're in history, they give you this pained expression because that was the course they hated in high school. But history can be exciting, intellectually rigorous, and fun.

This is what I would have done if I had to have a real job: I would have been a history teacher.

My dad worked three jobs and was a teacher. My mother was a teacher's aid, making, like, $3 an hour. My father went on to get his master's and became active in all these minority engineering programs. And my mother started running for public office. All that happened after the kids were adults. But I'm insanely proud of them.

I grew up between the two world wars and received a rather solid general education, the kind middle class children enjoyed in a country whose educational system had its roots dating back to the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy.

The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.

My mom was a history teacher, so I couldn't really avoid history when I was growing up. But we're very light on American history. We don't really have great opportunities to study both the Civil War and the Revolution.

I claimed identity as Jewish musicians for political reasons, because most of us were touring in Germany and, at this time, twelve years ago, there was a strong resurgence of Nazism in the places we were touring and part of that was on the music scene.

I did a history degree once.

A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.

I grew up in Rome, in actually what I would say was a liberal, open-minded family. My father was an architect and my mother was a teacher of art history, so it was sort of intellectual, and maybe a bit much for me when I was a child.

History is Philosophy teaching by example.

I grew up in Queens, in New York City, in a middle class Jewish family. My mother was a public school teacher, my father was a lawyer. They were Democrats - kind of middle-of-the-road democrats.

You can't hold me to the same standard as the president or a school teacher. I'm just a comedian. My job is like Archie Bunker.

My father was a Jewish immigrant who settled in Argentina and was left to his own devices at the age of 15. My mother was a teacher, herself the daughter of a poor immigrant family.

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

My mother was an elementary school teacher for 35 years and taught at the Nixon School in New Jersey. I was raised as a very liberal Democrat, and she was protesting Nixon when he was in office.

Islam was Europe's teacher. From the eighth to the 12th centuries.

Education is a slow process, and may not come too quickly. Anarchists who endeavor to hasten it by joining in the propaganda of State Socialism or revolution make a sad mistake indeed. They help to so force the march of events that the people will not have time to find out, by the study of their experience, that their troubles have been due to the rejection of competition. If this lesson shall not be learned in a season, the past will be repeated in the future

A writer who takes political, social or literary positions must act only with the means that are his. These means are the written words.

You cannot alter the past. You can only learn from it, and … history is the best teacher.

I sang for a sector of the population that didn’t think much of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee.

About the only way you can find out about the common man, his slang, what he looked like, what he thought, is through the comic strips. It's a powerful way for young people to learn history.

In America, when you hear about the Underground Railroad, it's so evocative. You think it's a literal subway for a few minutes before your teacher goes on and describes where it actually was.