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

More quotes by 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.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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Social democracy does not represent an ideal future it does not even represent the ideal past.
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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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Love consists in leaving the loved one space to be themselves while providing the security within which that self may flourish.
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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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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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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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History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.
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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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I grew up in a world where the social democratic state was the norm, not the exception.
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If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have
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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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