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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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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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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'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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Israel today is bad for the Jews.
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It does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel.
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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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But I'm English. We don't do uplifting.
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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.
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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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I grew up in a world where the social democratic state was the norm, not the exception.
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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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My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.
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The East European small countries have a sense of betrayal, of having been forgotten by Western leaders.
Tony Judt
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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.
Tony Judt
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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.
Tony Judt
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I don't much mind being expelled from communities.
Tony Judt
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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
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Words can make the illness a subject I can master, and not one that one simply emotes over.
Tony Judt