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If active or concerned citizens forfeit politics, they thereby abandon their society to its most mediocre and venal public servants

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
Concerned
Venal
Citizens
Forfeit
Public
Servants
Politics
Thereby
Society
Mediocre
Abandon
Servant
Active

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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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I don't much mind being expelled from communities.
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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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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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Words can make the illness a subject I can master, and not one that one simply emotes over.
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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.
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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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Social democracy does not represent an ideal future it does not even represent the ideal past.
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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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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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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 East European small countries have a sense of betrayal, of having been forgotten by Western leaders.
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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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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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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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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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It does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel.
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Israel today is bad for the Jews.
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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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We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.
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