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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.
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
Else
Condition
Wells
False
Well
Historical
Trajectories
Long
Tend
Characteristically
Things
Notion
Trajectory
Conditions
Default
Either
Beneficial
Running
Optimism
More quotes by Tony Judt
I don't believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action.
Tony Judt
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.
Tony Judt
I grew up in a world where the social democratic state was the norm, not the exception.
Tony Judt
But I'm English. We don't do uplifting.
Tony Judt
If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have
Tony Judt
The East European small countries have a sense of betrayal, of having been forgotten by Western leaders.
Tony Judt
How should we begin to make amends for raising a generation obsessed with the pursuit of material wealth and indifferent to so much else?
Tony Judt
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.
Tony Judt
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.
Tony Judt
After 1945 what happened was rather the opposite: with one major exception boundaries stayed broadly intact and people were moved instead.
Tony Judt
Israel today is bad for the Jews.
Tony Judt
Love consists in leaving the loved one space to be themselves while providing the security within which that self may flourish.
Tony Judt
Reality is a powerful solvent.
Tony Judt
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
If active or concerned citizens forfeit politics, they thereby abandon their society to its most mediocre and venal public servants
Tony Judt
Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life.
Tony Judt
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.
Tony Judt
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.
Tony Judt
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
We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.
Tony Judt