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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
Alternatives
Ideology
Imagine
Thrall
Best
Inability
People
Measured
Collectives
Collective
Holds

More quotes by Tony Judt

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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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Social democracy does not represent an ideal future it does not even represent the ideal past.
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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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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 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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The East European small countries have a sense of betrayal, of having been forgotten by Western leaders.
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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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We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.
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Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life.
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History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.
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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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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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But I'm English. We don't do uplifting.
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History can show you that it was one pile of bad stuff after another. It can also show you that there's been tremendous progress in knowledge, behaviour, laws, civilisation. It cannot show you that there was a meaning behind it.
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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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Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.
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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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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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