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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.

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
Collectives
Collective
Holds
Alternatives
Ideology
Imagine
Thrall
Best
Inability
People
Measured

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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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If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have
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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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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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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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My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.
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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 much mind being expelled from communities.
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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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History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.
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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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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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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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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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Israel today is bad for the Jews.
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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.
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Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.
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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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We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.
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