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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
Democracy
Future
Social
Past
Doe
Even
Represent
Ideal
Ideals

More quotes by 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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The people whose necks hurt when I write about the Middle East tend to live in Brooklyn or Boca Raton: the kind of Zionist who pays another man to live in Israel for him. I have nothing but contempt for such people.
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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 grew up in a world where the social democratic state was the norm, not the exception.
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Israel today is bad for the Jews.
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It does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel.
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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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Reality is a powerful solvent.
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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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I don't believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action.
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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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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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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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.
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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The East European small countries have a sense of betrayal, of having been forgotten by Western leaders.
Tony Judt
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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.
Tony Judt
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I don't much mind being expelled from communities.
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