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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.

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
Self
Collective
Feel
Jewish
Feels
Uncomfortable
Debt
Telling
Judaism
Responsibility
Questioning
Past
Collectives
Truth
Sensibility

More quotes by Tony Judt

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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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Reality is a powerful solvent.
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Social democracy does not represent an ideal future it does not even represent the ideal past.
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If active or concerned citizens forfeit politics, they thereby abandon their society to its most mediocre and venal public servants
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If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have
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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 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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We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.
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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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It does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel.
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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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We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.
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I don't much mind being expelled from communities.
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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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Words can make the illness a subject I can master, and not one that one simply emotes over.
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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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Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life.
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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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My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.
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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