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

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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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It does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel.
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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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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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I don't believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action.
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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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The East European small countries have a sense of betrayal, of having been forgotten by Western leaders.
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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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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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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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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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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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We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.
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If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have
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Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives.
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Words can make the illness a subject I can master, and not one that one simply emotes over.
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Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.
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Israel today is bad for the Jews.
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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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