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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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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
History
Laws
Stuff
Meaning
Shows
Behinds
Another
Behind
Cannot
Progress
Pile
Also
Law
Civilisation
Knowledge
Behaviour
Show
Tremendous

More quotes by Tony Judt

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The military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of its totality.
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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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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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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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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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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I don't believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action.
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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It does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel.
Tony Judt
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We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.
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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Israel today is bad for the Jews.
Tony Judt
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Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life.
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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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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History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.
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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How should we begin to make amends for raising a generation obsessed with the pursuit of material wealth and indifferent to so much else?
Tony Judt
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Reality is a powerful solvent.
Tony Judt