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

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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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We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.
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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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But I'm English. We don't do uplifting.
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It does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel.
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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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After 1945 what happened was rather the opposite: with one major exception boundaries stayed broadly intact and people were moved instead.
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History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.
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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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I don't believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action.
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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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We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.
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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 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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Reality is a powerful solvent.
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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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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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My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.
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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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Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.
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