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

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If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have
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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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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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We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.
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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 don't much mind being expelled from communities.
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But I'm English. We don't do uplifting.
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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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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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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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Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life.
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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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Israel today is bad for the Jews.
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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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History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.
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It does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel.
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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 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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