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

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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We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.
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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.
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If we remain grotesquely unequal, we shall lose all sense of fraternity: and fraternity, for all its fatuity as a political objective, turns out to be the necessary condition of politics itself.
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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.
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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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Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life.
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My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.
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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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But I'm English. We don't do uplifting.
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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.
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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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I don't much mind being expelled from communities.
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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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I was born accidentally. I lived accidentally in London. We nearly migrated to New Zealand. So much of my life has been a product of chance, I can't see a meaning in it at all.
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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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Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.
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If active or concerned citizens forfeit politics, they thereby abandon their society to its most mediocre and venal public servants
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History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.
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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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