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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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If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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It does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel.
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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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Reality is a powerful solvent.
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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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But I'm English. We don't do uplifting.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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