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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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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
Begin
Amends
Generations
Raising
Wealth
Indifferent
Else
Obsessed
Much
Pursuit
Make
Material
Generation
Materials

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Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life.
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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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My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.
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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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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.
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There were various different keys in which European history had tended to be written. One is the lyrical key, the idea that somehow, in Bretton-Woods in 1945, a bunch of well-intentioned men got together and said, This can't go on let's build a European Union. And it just wasn't like that.
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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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Reality is a powerful solvent.
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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.
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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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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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History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.
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But I'm English. We don't do uplifting.
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If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have
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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 much mind being expelled from communities.
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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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The East European small countries have a sense of betrayal, of having been forgotten by Western leaders.
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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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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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