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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
Grew
State
Social
States
World
Norm
Exception
Democratic

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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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Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives.
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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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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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I don't much mind being expelled from communities.
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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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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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My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.
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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.
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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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Social democracy does not represent an ideal future it does not even represent the ideal past.
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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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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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We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.
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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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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.
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Words can make the illness a subject I can master, and not one that one simply emotes over.
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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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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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