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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
World
Reinforces
Disenchantment
Confirms
Contributes
Unlike
Memory
Memories
History

More quotes by Tony Judt

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Social democracy does not represent an ideal future it does not even represent the ideal past.
Tony Judt
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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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Reality is a powerful solvent.
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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.
Tony Judt
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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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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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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
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If active or concerned citizens forfeit politics, they thereby abandon their society to its most mediocre and venal public servants
Tony Judt
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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.
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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If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have
Tony Judt
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Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives.
Tony Judt
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I grew up in a world where the social democratic state was the norm, not the exception.
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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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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The military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of its totality.
Tony Judt
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Israel today is bad for the Jews.
Tony Judt
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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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But I'm English. We don't do uplifting.
Tony Judt
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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.
Tony Judt