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If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have

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
Fall
Disrepair
Substitute
Substitutes
Words

More quotes by Tony Judt

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I grew up in a world where the social democratic state was the norm, not the exception.
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
Tony Judt
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But I'm English. We don't do uplifting.
Tony Judt
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Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.
Tony Judt
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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.
Tony Judt
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Words can make the illness a subject I can master, and not one that one simply emotes over.
Tony Judt
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Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life.
Tony Judt
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The East European small countries have a sense of betrayal, of having been forgotten by Western leaders.
Tony Judt
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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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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.
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.
Tony Judt
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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?
Tony Judt
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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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I don't believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action.
Tony Judt
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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.
Tony Judt
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Reality is a powerful solvent.
Tony Judt
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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.
Tony Judt
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We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.
Tony Judt
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We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.
Tony Judt
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Social democracy does not represent an ideal future it does not even represent the ideal past.
Tony Judt