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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
Knowledge
Think
Wrong
Thinking
Society
World
Upon
Free
Look
Critically

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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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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.
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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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If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have
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But I'm English. We don't do uplifting.
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The East European small countries have a sense of betrayal, of having been forgotten by Western leaders.
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We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.
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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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I grew up in a world where the social democratic state was the norm, not the exception.
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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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History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.
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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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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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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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Reality is a powerful solvent.
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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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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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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
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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.
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Social democracy does not represent an ideal future it does not even represent the ideal past.
Tony Judt