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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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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
Looks
Citizens
Must
Duty
Think
Knowledge
Thinking
Wrong
World
Society
Upon
Free
Look
Critically

More quotes by 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.
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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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It does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel.
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Reality is a powerful solvent.
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History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.
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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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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'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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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.
Tony Judt
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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.
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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I don't much mind being expelled from communities.
Tony Judt
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Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life.
Tony Judt
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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
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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.
Tony Judt
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We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.
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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My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.
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