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The East European small countries have a sense of betrayal, of having been forgotten by Western leaders.

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
Country
Leaders
East
Countries
Forgotten
Western
Leader
Small
Betrayal
Sense
European

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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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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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Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives.
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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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If active or concerned citizens forfeit politics, they thereby abandon their society to its most mediocre and venal public servants
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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 have responsibilities for others, not just across space but across time. We have responsibilities to people who came before us. They left us a world of institutions, ideas or possibilities for which we, in turn, owe them something. One of the things we owe them is not to squander them.
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We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.
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Words can make the illness a subject I can master, and not one that one simply emotes over.
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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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My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.
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We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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