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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
Book
Places
Writing
Based
Saws
Strange
Books
Reading
Rather
History
Exotic

More quotes by Tony Judt

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Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life.
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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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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 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.
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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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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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I don't believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action.
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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.
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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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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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We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.
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We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.
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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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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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Israel today is bad for the Jews.
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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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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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History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.
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But I'm English. We don't do uplifting.
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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.
Tony Judt