Quote

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

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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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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If active or concerned citizens forfeit politics, they thereby abandon their society to its most mediocre and venal public servants
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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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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 East European small countries have a sense of betrayal, of having been forgotten by Western leaders.
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Social democracy does not represent an ideal future it does not even represent the ideal past.
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It does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel.
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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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I grew up in a world where the social democratic state was the norm, not the exception.
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But I'm English. We don't do uplifting.
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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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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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History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.
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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 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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Israel today is bad for the Jews.
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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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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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If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have
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