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

More quotes by Tony Judt

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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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My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.
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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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If active or concerned citizens forfeit politics, they thereby abandon their society to its most mediocre and venal public servants
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We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.
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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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The East European small countries have a sense of betrayal, of having been forgotten by Western leaders.
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It does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel.
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Reality is a powerful solvent.
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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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I grew up in a world where the social democratic state was the norm, not the exception.
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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.
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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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Social democracy does not represent an ideal future it does not even represent the ideal past.
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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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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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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 always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.
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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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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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