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

More quotes by 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.
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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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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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Israel today is bad for the Jews.
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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 active or concerned citizens forfeit politics, they thereby abandon their society to its most mediocre and venal public servants
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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'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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I don't believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action.
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We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.
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Reality is a powerful solvent.
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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.
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Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.
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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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The East European small countries have a sense of betrayal, of having been forgotten by Western leaders.
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We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.
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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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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 always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.
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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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