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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.

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
Opportunity
Outcomes
Need
Divided
Inequities
Needs
Forth
Excessively
Injustice
Unfairness
Wealth
Injustices
Start
Outcome
Talking
Assets
Society
Inequality

More quotes by Tony Judt

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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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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 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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I don't much mind being expelled from communities.
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We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.
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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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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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Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life.
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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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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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The East European small countries have a sense of betrayal, of having been forgotten by Western leaders.
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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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History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.
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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.
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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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Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.
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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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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 know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.
Tony Judt