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I grew up in a world where the social democratic state was the norm, not the exception.

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
World
Norm
Exception
Democratic
Grew
State
Social
States

More quotes by Tony Judt

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We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.
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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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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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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If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have
Tony Judt
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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.
Tony Judt
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History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.
Tony Judt
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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.
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
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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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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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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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I don't believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action.
Tony Judt
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Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life.
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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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.
Tony Judt
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I don't much mind being expelled from communities.
Tony Judt
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Reality is a powerful solvent.
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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Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives.
Tony Judt