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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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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
Born
Accidentally
Much
Nearly
Life
Product
London
Products
Lived
Meaning
Migrated
Chance
Zealand

More quotes by 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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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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Social democracy does not represent an ideal future it does not even represent the ideal past.
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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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If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have
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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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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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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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Israel today is bad for the Jews.
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.
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History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.
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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I've lost count of the interviews I've done about my illness and its relationship to my ideas and writing.
Tony Judt
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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.
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.
Tony Judt
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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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My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.
Tony Judt
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Reality is a powerful solvent.
Tony Judt
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Love consists in leaving the loved one space to be themselves while providing the security within which that self may flourish.
Tony Judt
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We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.
Tony Judt