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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
History
Exotic
Book
Places
Writing
Based
Saws
Strange
Books

More quotes by 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.
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History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.
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Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.
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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.
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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.
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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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We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.
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We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.
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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 words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have
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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?
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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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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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I grew up in a world where the social democratic state was the norm, not the exception.
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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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Reality is a powerful solvent.
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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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It does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel.
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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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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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