Quote

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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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
Loses
Fraternity
Shall
Objective
Politics
Objectives
Turns
Condition
Sense
Remain
Political
Necessary
Conditions
Grotesquely
Lose
Unequal

More quotes by Tony Judt

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We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.
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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 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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Israel today is bad for the Jews.
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My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.
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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.
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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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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.
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I don't believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action.
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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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Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life.
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Social democracy does not represent an ideal future it does not even represent the ideal past.
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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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If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have
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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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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 don't much mind being expelled from communities.
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We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.
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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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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