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My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.
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
Reading
Rather
Exotic
History
Places
Book
Based
Writing
Saws
Strange
Books
More quotes by Tony Judt
Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life.
Tony Judt
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.
Tony Judt
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
Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.
Tony Judt
History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.
Tony Judt
Love consists in leaving the loved one space to be themselves while providing the security within which that self may flourish.
Tony Judt
It does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel.
Tony Judt
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
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.
Tony Judt
Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives.
Tony Judt
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
Israel today is bad for the Jews.
Tony Judt
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
Social democracy does not represent an ideal future it does not even represent the ideal past.
Tony Judt
But I'm English. We don't do uplifting.
Tony Judt
Reality is a powerful solvent.
Tony Judt
If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have
Tony Judt
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
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
The military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of its totality.
Tony Judt