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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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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
Moved
Intact
Instead
Stayed
Happened
Exception
Rather
Boundaries
People
Opposite
Opposites
Majors
Major
Broadly

More quotes by Tony Judt

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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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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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Israel today is bad for the Jews.
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But I'm English. We don't do uplifting.
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I don't much mind being expelled from communities.
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It does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel.
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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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History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.
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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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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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Words can make the illness a subject I can master, and not one that one simply emotes over.
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We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.
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Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.
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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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The military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of its totality.
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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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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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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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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.
Tony Judt