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

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
Stays
History
Happens
Ever
Nothing
Always

More quotes by Tony Judt

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Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life.
Tony Judt
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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.
Tony Judt
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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.
Tony Judt
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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.
Tony Judt
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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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We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.
Tony Judt
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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.
Tony Judt
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Social democracy does not represent an ideal future it does not even represent the ideal past.
Tony Judt
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Love consists in leaving the loved one space to be themselves while providing the security within which that self may flourish.
Tony Judt
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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.
Tony Judt
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But I'm English. We don't do uplifting.
Tony Judt
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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.
Tony Judt
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It does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel.
Tony Judt
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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.
Tony Judt
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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.
Tony Judt
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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.
Tony Judt
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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.
Tony Judt
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The East European small countries have a sense of betrayal, of having been forgotten by Western leaders.
Tony Judt
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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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Reality is a powerful solvent.
Tony Judt