Tony Judt Quotes

The international proletariat first appeared on the scene in the early Thirties of the nineteenth century, and its first great action was the French Revolution of 1848.

'The Discovery of France' by Graham Robb is teaching me lots about a country I've long loved but realise I didn't really know.

The French are ... the most brilliant and the most dangerous nation of Europe, and the one that is surest to inspire admiration, hatred, terror, or pity, but never indifference.

The student of French history will recall three systems which have tried to deal with this admitted passion of the French people. The Bourbons crushed it; the Orleanists snubbed it; the Bonapartes deceived it.

I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I've ended up doing that myself.

For even the ordinary well-read person, the French Enlightenment is largely restricted to the three big-name philosophes: Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire.

Now, if you are like me - if you are like practically anybody in America - then you probably hold some negative opinions about the French, based upon movies, rumors, recent headlines, unfortunate run-ins with Parisian waiters, or... you know... all that unpleasantness surrounding the Vichy regime.

If you look back at the history of creativity in clothes - the French Revolution, the First World War and the Second World War - they have all been creative reinventions, the moment new forms of luxury come into play.

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

There's something Vichy about the French.

The French revolution taught us the rights of man.

In France, history is paralyzing.

Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to write historical novels because I can't do plots.' But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things.

I was France.

History was a hobby for about, oh, 20 years before I got into print.

The French, I think, in general, are strangely prolix in their natural history.

The history of France, a permanent miracle, has the singular privilege of impassioning the peoples of the earth to the point where they all take part in French quarrels.

If the Germans are beaten, General de Gaulle will return. He will be supported by 80 or 90 per cent of the French people and I shall be hanged.

The “terror” of the French Revolution lasted for ten years. The terror that preceded and led to it lasted for a thousand years.

I have tried to lift France out of the mud. But she will return to her errors and vomiting. I cannot prevent the French from being French.

A small acquaintance with history shows that all governments are selfish and the French governments more selfish than most.

The best picture I can give of the French Nation, is that of Cattle before a Thunder Storm.

France is an old country that does not forget.

I must warn the French not to confuse the newspaper clamor with the voice of the English proletariat which, unfortunately for the two countries, Ireland and England, has no echo in the English press.

Communism is Western, and alien to everything Arab, having absolutely no connection to Arab history, intellectual traditions, and way of life in either the past or the present