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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
People
Measured
Collectives
Collective
Holds
Alternatives
Ideology
Imagine
Thrall
Best
Inability

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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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History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.
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I don't much mind being expelled from communities.
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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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We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.
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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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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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But I'm English. We don't do uplifting.
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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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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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Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life.
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Israel today is bad for the Jews.
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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 grew up in a world where the social democratic state was the norm, not the exception.
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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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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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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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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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Reality is a powerful solvent.
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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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