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Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.

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
Contributes
Unlike
Memory
Memories
History
World
Reinforces
Disenchantment
Confirms

More quotes by Tony Judt

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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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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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Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life.
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History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.
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But I'm English. We don't do uplifting.
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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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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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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
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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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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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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.
Tony Judt
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It does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel.
Tony Judt
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We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.
Tony Judt
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Reality is a powerful solvent.
Tony Judt
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Israel today is bad for the Jews.
Tony Judt
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We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.
Tony Judt
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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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My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.
Tony Judt
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I don't much mind being expelled from communities.
Tony Judt
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Social democracy does not represent an ideal future it does not even represent the ideal past.
Tony Judt