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

More quotes by 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.
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We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.
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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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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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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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Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life.
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But I'm English. We don't do uplifting.
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Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.
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I don't much mind being expelled from communities.
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If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have
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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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History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.
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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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Reality is a powerful solvent.
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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 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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Social democracy does not represent an ideal future it does not even represent the ideal past.
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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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Israel today is bad for the Jews.
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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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