When the Facts Change Quotes

“You cannot anticipate either the context of the motives of readers in unconstrained futures.”
― Tony Judt, When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995-2010

“Better to know why you are sending it up in the first place and worry less about its safe landing. . . .”
― Tony Judt, When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995-2010

“That way you distort the latter and corrode the integrity of the writing itself. In that sense, it is like shooting at the moon—you have to allow that it won’t be in the same place by the time the rocket gets there.”
― Tony Judt, When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995-2010

“You cannot write with a view to impact or response.”
― Tony Judt, When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995-2010

“One of them says this:”
― Tony Judt, When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995-2010

“He never finished the essay—it breaks off midway in notes and scattered thoughts.”
― Tony Judt, When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995-2010

“For Tony, being Jewish was a given—the oldest piece of furniture in the place. It was the only identity that he possessed unequivocally.”
― Tony Judt, When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995-2010

“By the time he sat down to write the essay, he had copied, recopied, and memorized most of what he needed to know.”
― Tony Judt, When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995-2010

“he retranscribed all of his original notes in the order of the outline.”
― Tony Judt, When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995-2010

“Then he sat for hours on end, monklike, at the dining room table assigning each line in his notes, each fact, date, point, or idea, to a place in the outline.”
― Tony Judt, When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995-2010

“He had a system for writing, and the essays in this book were all written according to the same method, even those from 2008 to 2010 when he was ill and quadriplegic.”
― Tony Judt, When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995-2010

“He was a great writer because he was always fine-tuning his words, craftsmanlike, to this inner pitch.”
― Tony Judt, When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995-2010

“He had great inner certainty.”
― Tony Judt, When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995-2010

“we owe the title of this volume, which comes from a (probably apocryphal) quote from Keynes that was one of Tony’s favorite mantras: “when the facts change, I change my mind—what do you do, sir?”
― Tony Judt, When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995-2010

“A word about facts: I have never met anyone as committed to facts as Tony,”
― Tony Judt, When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995-2010

“They are all here: Europe and America, Israel and the Middle East, justice, the public sphere, the state, international relations, memory and forgetting, and above all history.”
― Tony Judt, When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995-2010

“Tony’s obsessions.”
― Tony Judt, When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995-2010

“SO THIS IS A COLLECTION of essays, but it is also a collection of obsessions.”
― Tony Judt, When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995-2010

“He was very English, too, by habit and upbringing (he could move effortlessly between his childhood cockney and confident Oxbridge prose), but he wasn’t really that either—too Jewish, too Central European.”
― Tony Judt, When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995-2010

“He was more Central European, but not exactly that either—he didn’t quite have that history, except by professional engagement and family roots (Russian, Polish, Romanian, and Lithuanian Jews).”
― Tony Judt, When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995-2010

“Sure, he spoke French, German, Italian, Hebrew, Czech, some Spanish, but he was never “at home” in any of these places.”
― Tony Judt, When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995-2010

“Finally—the key to our courtship—he invited me on a trip to Europe: Paris, Vienna, Budapest, a hair-raising drive over the Simplon Pass in a storm (I drove—he had migraines). We took trains, and I watched him pouring over timetables, clocking departures and arrivals like a kid in a candy store: Zermatt, Brig, Florence, Venice.”
― Tony Judt, When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995-2010

“In the summer of 1991, I traveled across Central Europe, and when I got back I wanted to know more. I was advised to take an independent study with Tony Judt.”
― Tony Judt, When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995-2010

“As the facts changed and events unfolded, Tony found himself turned increasingly and unhappily against the current, fighting with all of his intellectual might to turn the ship of ideas, however slightly, in a different direction.”
― Tony Judt, When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995-2010

“The arc is down: from the heights of hope and possibility, with the revolutions of 1989, into the confusion, devastation, and loss of 9/11, the Iraq war, the deepening crisis in the Middle East, and—as Tony saw it—the self-defeating decline of the American republic.”
― Tony Judt, When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995-2010

“This is a book about our age.”
― Tony Judt, When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995-2010

“As you read these essays, I hope that you, too, will focus on the ideas, because they are good ideas, and they were written in good faith.”
― Tony Judt, When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995-2010

“The only way for me to write this introduction is to separate the man from the ideas. Otherwise, I get pulled back into the man, who I loved and was married to from 1993 until his death in 2010, rather than forward into the ideas.”
― Tony Judt, When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995-2010