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

More quotes by Tony Judt

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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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I don't much mind being expelled from communities.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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Reality is a powerful solvent.
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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.
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We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.
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We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.
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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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Israel today is bad for the Jews.
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Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.
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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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If active or concerned citizens forfeit politics, they thereby abandon their society to its most mediocre and venal public servants
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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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It does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel.
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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If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have
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History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.
Tony Judt