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

More quotes by Tony Judt

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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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Reality is a powerful solvent.
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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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Words can make the illness a subject I can master, and not one that one simply emotes over.
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We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.
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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.
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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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Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.
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Social democracy does not represent an ideal future it does not even represent the ideal past.
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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.
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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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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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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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Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life.
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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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I grew up in a world where the social democratic state was the norm, not the exception.
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History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.
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?
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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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The military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of its totality.
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