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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
Social
States
World
Norm
Exception
Democratic
Grew
State

More quotes by Tony Judt

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We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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I don't believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action.
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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The East European small countries have a sense of betrayal, of having been forgotten by Western leaders.
Tony Judt
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Israel today is bad for the Jews.
Tony Judt
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I don't much mind being expelled from communities.
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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We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.
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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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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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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Reality is a powerful solvent.
Tony Judt