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Social democracy does not represent an ideal future it does not even represent the ideal past.

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
Past
Doe
Even
Represent
Ideal
Ideals
Democracy
Future
Social

More quotes by Tony Judt

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Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.
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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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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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But I'm English. We don't do uplifting.
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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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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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It does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel.
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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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Love consists in leaving the loved one space to be themselves while providing the security within which that self may flourish.
Tony Judt
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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.
Tony Judt
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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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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 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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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 much mind being expelled from communities.
Tony Judt
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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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Words can make the illness a subject I can master, and not one that one simply emotes over.
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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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I grew up in a world where the social democratic state was the norm, not the exception.
Tony Judt