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" Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life. "
Tony Judt
You
Everything
Israel
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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. "
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" I know exactly how and where I am going to die. The only question is when. "
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" I think if I'm controversial it's not because I set out to be. It's because I've never felt comfortable being part of someone else's mainstream community. "
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Think
Community
" Social democrats are characteristically modest - a political quality whose virtues are overestimated. We need to apologise a little less for our shortcomings and speak more assertively of achievements. That these were always incomplete should not trouble us. "
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" We are not merely historians but also and always citizens. "
Tony Judt
Also
Always
Citizens
" History can show you that it was one pile of bad stuff after another. It can also show you that there's been tremendous progress in knowledge, behaviour, laws, civilisation. It cannot show you that there was a meaning behind it. "
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Progress
History
Knowledge
" There is nothing to be said for being crippled. You don't see the world better or clearer, nor do you develop some special set of skills by way of compensation. "
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World
" I just like being on my own on trains, traveling. I spent all my pocket money travelling the London Underground and Southern Railway, what used to be the Western region, and in Europe as much as I could afford it. My parents used to think I was going places, but I wasn't, I was just travelling the trains. "
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Parents
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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
Society
Wealth
Start
" You don't have to be Jewish to understand the history of Europe in the 20th century, but it helps. "
Tony Judt
Europe
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History
" 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
I Am
Go
Optimism
" It does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel. "
Tony Judt
Me
Irritate
I Am
" Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so? "
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Here
Difficulty
Why
" 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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Time
Turn
Ideas
" I don't much mind being expelled from communities. "
Tony Judt
Expelled
Much
Being
" I went to live on a kibbutz, and I'd idealized the world of collective, agrarian work, where everyone was equal, everyone contributed, that all this awful European intellectual stuff just fell away. "
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Work
World
Equal
" My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books. "
Tony Judt
History
Strange
Reading
" I grew up in a world where the social democratic state was the norm, not the exception. "
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Where
Social
World
" It would be suicide in the American academy to show too early an interest beyond your doctoral specialization: charges of everything from charlatanry to ambition would be levied and tenure denied. I've seen this first-hand. "
Tony Judt
Suicide
Show
Early
" No one wants to live in a wheelchair unable to talk, only winking once for yes and twice for no. It's perfectly reasonable that there will come a point where the balance of judgment of life over death swings the other way. "
Tony Judt
Talk
Balance
Death
" I've lost count of the interviews I've done about my illness and its relationship to my ideas and writing. "
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Lost
Done
Ideas
" 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
Write
Boss
Strong
" 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
Chance
My Life
Born
" Words can make the illness a subject I can master, and not one that one simply emotes over. "
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I Can
Master
Words
" I would say that I have become more radical as I have gotten older. I started out very radical when I was young, like most people, but I became less actively politically engaged in the middle of my life. "
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People
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Young
" The pleasures of mental agility are much overstated, inevitably - as it now appears to me - by those not exclusively dependent upon them. "
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Now
Agility
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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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Action
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Moral
" 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. "
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Death
Life
New
" American social arrangements, economic arrangements, the degree of inequality in American life, the relatively small role played by the government in American public life and so forth, compares to exactly the opposite conditions in most of the European societies. "
Tony Judt
American
Government
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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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Everyone
Wherever
Point