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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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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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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.
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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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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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If active or concerned citizens forfeit politics, they thereby abandon their society to its most mediocre and venal public servants
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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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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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Words can make the illness a subject I can master, and not one that one simply emotes over.
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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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Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life.
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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.
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'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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Reality is a powerful solvent.
Tony Judt
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Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.
Tony Judt
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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.
Tony Judt
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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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If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have
Tony Judt
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But I'm English. We don't do uplifting.
Tony Judt
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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.
Tony Judt