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

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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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If active or concerned citizens forfeit politics, they thereby abandon their society to its most mediocre and venal public servants
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But I'm English. We don't do uplifting.
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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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The East European small countries have a sense of betrayal, of having been forgotten by Western leaders.
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Israel today is bad for the Jews.
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We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.
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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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Social democracy does not represent an ideal future it does not even represent the ideal past.
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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 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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After 1945 what happened was rather the opposite: with one major exception boundaries stayed broadly intact and people were moved instead.
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Words can make the illness a subject I can master, and not one that one simply emotes over.
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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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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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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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Reality is a powerful solvent.
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Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.
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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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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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