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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
Best
Inability
People
Measured
Collectives
Collective
Holds
Alternatives
Ideology
Imagine
Thrall

More quotes by Tony Judt

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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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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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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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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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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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Social democracy does not represent an ideal future it does not even represent the ideal past.
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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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Israel today is bad for the Jews.
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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.
Tony Judt
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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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Words can make the illness a subject I can master, and not one that one simply emotes over.
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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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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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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.
Tony Judt
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Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life.
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We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.
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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.
Tony Judt
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History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.
Tony Judt
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If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have
Tony Judt