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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
Ever
Nothing
Always
Stays
History
Happens

More quotes by Tony Judt

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But I'm English. We don't do uplifting.
Tony Judt
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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.
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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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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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.
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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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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Reality is a powerful solvent.
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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Israel today is bad for the Jews.
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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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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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.
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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My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.
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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If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have
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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How should we begin to make amends for raising a generation obsessed with the pursuit of material wealth and indifferent to so much else?
Tony Judt
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If active or concerned citizens forfeit politics, they thereby abandon their society to its most mediocre and venal public servants
Tony Judt