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

More quotes by Tony Judt

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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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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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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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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 are not merely historians but also and always citizens.
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Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life.
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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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Social democracy does not represent an ideal future it does not even represent the ideal past.
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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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It does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel.
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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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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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My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.
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History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.
Tony Judt
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Israel today is bad for the Jews.
Tony Judt
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We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.
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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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I don't believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action.
Tony Judt
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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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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.
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