We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.

For Europe to play a part in the world on the scale of its wealth and its population and its capacities, Europe has to be united in some way, and Europe is not united.

My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.

If active or concerned citizens forfeit politics, they thereby abandon their society to its most mediocre and venal public servants

I see myself as, first and above all, a teacher of history; next, a writer of European history; next, a commentator on European affairs; next, a public intellectual voice within the American left; and only then an occasional, opportunistic participant in the pained American discussion of the Jewish matter.

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.

History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.

Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.

I know exactly how and where I am going to die. The only question is when.

At a certain point, to remain slightly tangential to wherever I was became a way of ‘being Tony‘: by not being anything that everyone else was.

We need to learn… how war brutalises and degrades winners and losers alike and what happens to us when, having heedlessly waged war for no good reason, we are encouraged to inflate and demonise our enemies in order to justify that war’s indefinite continuance.

Obviously a primary liberal conviction is that we should be tolerant of other peoples’ convictions. But if we believe in something, we had better find ways to say so convincingly.

Nationalist, anti-European, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim public political figures, seem a worrying picture of a possible European future. We could still fall back into pre-Europe… and it worries me.

The people whose necks hurt when I write about the Middle East tend to live in Brooklyn or Boca Raton: the kind of Zionist who pays another man to live in Israel for him. I have nothing but contempt for such 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 can still boss people around. I can still write. I can still read. I can still eat, and I can still have very strong views.

When you are in my classroom, you get everything from me. But you bloody well better give everything too.

We need to start talking about inequality again; we need to start talking about the inequities and unfairnesses and the injustices of an excessively divided society, divided by wealth, by opportunity, by outcome, by assets and so forth.

American social arrangements, economic arrangements, the degree of inequality in American life, the relatively small role played by the government in American public life and so forth, compares to exactly the opposite conditions in most of the European societies.

Love consists in leaving the loved one space to be themselves while providing the security within which that self may flourish.

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

As citizens of a free society, we have a duty to look critically at our world. But if we think we know what is wrong, we must act upon that knowledge.

What I am against is false optimism: the notion either that things have to go well, or else that they tend to, or else that the default condition of historical trajectories is characteristically beneficial in the long-run.

Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life.

There is nothing to be said for being crippled. You don’t see the world better or clearer, nor do you develop some special set of skills by way of compensation.

If we have learned nothing else from the 20th century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences. Incremental improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for, and probably all we should seek.

I don’t want to be the passively alert vegetable in the corner that takes in everything but can’t communicate, which I think would suck a lot of life out of my family without giving very much to me.

We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.

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

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’ve lost count of the interviews I’ve done about my illness and its relationship to my ideas and writing.

I would say that I have become more radical as I have gotten older. I started out very radical when I was young, like most people, but I became less actively politically engaged in the middle of my life.

I was born in 1948, so I’m a ’60s kid, and in the ’60s everyone talked all the time, endlessly, about socialism versus capitalism, about political choices, ideology, Marxism, revolution, ‘the system‘ and so on.