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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.

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
Aspect
Independent
Nation
Military
System
Nations
Totality
Social
Section
Sections

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If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have
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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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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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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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Israel today is bad for the Jews.
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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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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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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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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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The East European small countries have a sense of betrayal, of having been forgotten by Western leaders.
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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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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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But I'm English. We don't do uplifting.
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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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Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.
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?
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Social democracy does not represent an ideal future it does not even represent the ideal past.
Tony Judt
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We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.
Tony Judt
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I don't much mind being expelled from communities.
Tony Judt
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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