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We have responsibilities for others, not just across space but across time. We have responsibilities to people who came before us. They left us a world of institutions, ideas or possibilities for which we, in turn, owe them something. One of the things we owe them is not to squander them.

Tony Judt

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Tony Judt
Age: 62 †
Born: 1948
Born: January 2
Died: 2010
Died: August 6
Essayist
Historian
Non-Fiction Writer
Professor
Teacher
London
England
Tony Robert Judt
Others
Across
Ideas
Possibility
Something
Turn
Things
Responsibility
Time
Came
Squander
World
Space
Responsibilities
People
Turns
Possibilities
Left
Institutions

More quotes by Tony Judt

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It does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel.
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Judaism for me is a sensibility of collective self-questioning and uncomfortable truth-telling. I feel a debt of responsibility to this past. It is why I am Jewish.
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How should we begin to make amends for raising a generation obsessed with the pursuit of material wealth and indifferent to so much else?
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I've lost count of the interviews I've done about my illness and its relationship to my ideas and writing.
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We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.
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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.
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The military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of its totality.
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History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.
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History can show you that it was one pile of bad stuff after another. It can also show you that there's been tremendous progress in knowledge, behaviour, laws, civilisation. It cannot show you that there was a meaning behind it.
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After 1945 what happened was rather the opposite: with one major exception boundaries stayed broadly intact and people were moved instead.
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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.
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I don't believe in an afterlife. I don't believe in a single or multiple godhead. I respect people who do, but I don't believe it myself.
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There were various different keys in which European history had tended to be written. One is the lyrical key, the idea that somehow, in Bretton-Woods in 1945, a bunch of well-intentioned men got together and said, This can't go on let's build a European Union. And it just wasn't like that.
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If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have
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I don't believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action.
Tony Judt
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But I'm English. We don't do uplifting.
Tony Judt
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Words can make the illness a subject I can master, and not one that one simply emotes over.
Tony Judt
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Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.
Tony Judt
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We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.
Tony Judt
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Social democracy does not represent an ideal future it does not even represent the ideal past.
Tony Judt