Quote

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

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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
Together
Bunch
Well
Various
Intentioned
Different
Keys
Tended
Men
Build
Lyrical
Like
Wasn
European
Written
Union
Idea
Woods
History
Somehow

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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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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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But I'm English. We don't do uplifting.
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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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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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We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.
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Social democracy does not represent an ideal future it does not even represent the ideal past.
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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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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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Reality is a powerful solvent.
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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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Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life.
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Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.
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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.
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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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The military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of its totality.
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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.
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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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