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We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.

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
Merely
Citizens
Also
Always
Historians
Historian

More quotes by Tony Judt

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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.
Tony Judt
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History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.
Tony Judt
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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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It does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel.
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
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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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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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Reality is a powerful solvent.
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
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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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 much mind being expelled from communities.
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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My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.
Tony Judt
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Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life.
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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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.
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.
Tony Judt
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Israel today is bad for the Jews.
Tony Judt
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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