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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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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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But I'm English. We don't do uplifting.
Tony Judt
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Reality is a powerful solvent.
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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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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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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Social democracy does not represent an ideal future it does not even represent the ideal past.
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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History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.
Tony Judt
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Israel today is bad for the Jews.
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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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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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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Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.
Tony Judt
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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.
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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The East European small countries have a sense of betrayal, of having been forgotten by Western leaders.
Tony Judt
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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.
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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I grew up in a world where the social democratic state was the norm, not the exception.
Tony Judt