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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
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Behind
Cannot
Progress
Pile
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Law
Civilisation
Knowledge
Behaviour
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Tremendous
History
Laws
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Meaning
More quotes by Tony Judt
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.
Tony Judt
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
What I am against is false optimism: the notion either that things have to go well, or else that they tend to, or else that the default condition of historical trajectories is characteristically beneficial in the long-run.
Tony Judt
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
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.
Tony Judt
Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives.
Tony Judt
We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.
Tony Judt
Social democracy does not represent an ideal future it does not even represent the ideal past.
Tony Judt
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
I don't much mind being expelled from communities.
Tony Judt
I don't believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action.
Tony Judt
After 1945 what happened was rather the opposite: with one major exception boundaries stayed broadly intact and people were moved instead.
Tony Judt
The East European small countries have a sense of betrayal, of having been forgotten by Western leaders.
Tony Judt
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
If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have
Tony Judt
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.
Tony Judt
It does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel.
Tony Judt
But I'm English. We don't do uplifting.
Tony Judt
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
I've lost count of the interviews I've done about my illness and its relationship to my ideas and writing.
Tony Judt