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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.

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
People
Middle
Necks
Write
Contempt
Another
Israel
Live
East
Nothing
Tend
Writing
Whose
Zionist
Kind
Pay
Brooklyn
Men
Hurt
Pays

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I don't much mind being expelled from communities.
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The East European small countries have a sense of betrayal, of having been forgotten by Western leaders.
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Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life.
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We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.
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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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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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But I'm English. We don't do uplifting.
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Reality is a powerful solvent.
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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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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'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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History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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