Quote

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.

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
Wells
False
Well
Historical
Trajectories
Long
Tend
Characteristically
Things
Notion
Trajectory
Conditions
Default
Either
Beneficial
Running
Optimism
Else
Condition

More quotes by Tony Judt

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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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It does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel.
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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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Israel today is bad for the Jews.
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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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Social democracy does not represent an ideal future it does not even represent the ideal past.
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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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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.
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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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My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.
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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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The East European small countries have a sense of betrayal, of having been forgotten by Western leaders.
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We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.
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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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History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.
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Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.
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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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Reality is a powerful solvent.
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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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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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