“My concern tonight is the following: 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? We appear to have lost the capacity to question the present, much less offer alternatives to it. Why is it so beyond us to conceive of a different set of arrangements to our common advantage?”

— Tony Judt

" What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy? http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2009/12/17/what-is-living-and-what-is-dead-in-social-democrac/" (2009)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Tony Judt 37

British historian 1948–2010

Titon Rahmawan

“Now first of all I would like to talk about the question of different ideologies and social systems. We have to admit that among our Asian and African countries, we do have different ideologies and different social systems. But this does not prevent us from seeking common ground and being united.”

Zhou Enlai (1898–1976) 1st Premier of the People's Republic of China

Supplementary Speech at the Plenary Session of the Asian African-Conference (19 April 1955)

“To be individual, my friends, to be different from others, is the only way to become distinguished from the common herd. Let us be glad, therefore, that we differ from one another in form and in disposition. Variety is the spice of life, and we are various enough to enjoy one another's society; so let us be content.”

L. Frank Baum book The Lost Princess of Oz

The Lost Princess of Oz (1917)
Later Oz novels
Context: Were we all like the Sawhorse, we would all be Sawhorses, which would be too many of the kind. Were we all like Hank, we would be a herd of mules; if like Toto, we would be a pack of dogs; should we all become the shape of the Woozy, he would no longer be remarkable for his unusual appearance. Finally, were you all like me, I would consider you so common that I would not care to associate with you. To be individual, my friends, to be different from others, is the only way to become distinguished from the common herd. Let us be glad, therefore, that we differ from one another in form and in disposition. Variety is the spice of life, and we are various enough to enjoy one another's society; so let us be content.

“We differ, blind and seeing, one from another, not in our senses, but in the use we make of them, in the imagination and courage with which we seek wisdom beyond the senses.”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

The Five-sensed World (1910)

“For 40 years, there has been a one-sided discussion blaming Black people for their own victimization. And so Black people accept it. It's that pervasive that African Americans as a whole, and organizations that are supposed to defend our civil rights, accept that logic. We have to fight back against that logic and offer a different argument for why inequality and discrimination runs right through this society.”

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (1950) American academic and author

The fight against racism doesn't stop here (2013)

“Freedom is essentially a condition of inequality, not equality. It recognizes as a fact of nature the structural differences inherent in man — in temperament, character, and capacity — and it respects those differences. We are not alike and no law can make us so.”

Frank Chodorov (1887–1966) American libertarian thinker

Source: Fugitive Essays: Selected Writings of Frank Chodorov (1980), p. 397, “Freedom Is Better,” Plain Talk, (November 1949)

“Even if we come from different sides of the world, speak different languages. Even if we eat too many chips, or rice balls. Even if we have different tastes in games. Every one of us, here today, is identical, in the most important way. Each one of us has the heart of a gamer.”

Satoru Iwata (1959–2015) Japanese video game programmer and businessman

2005 GDC Keynote https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnrEosZKzp4&t=8m6s

“Why should we put up with the present evils in our society? As opposed to the society we are visualizing, the present one can be described as a diseased one. The evils are there on all levels, international and national, and even within the smaller units such as towns and families. Of course, the disease did not appear like a bolt from the blue, either yesterday, or last year. It is the result of factors that have deep roots and long lives. These consist of privations, discriminations oppressions, bigotries, hatreds, and hostilities; poverty, ignorance, hunger, and illiteracy. Each and all of these have been left to us as ar evil heritage from the past. The fundamental difference between our situation today and that of our forefathers is that now knowledge has enabled us to realize that these evils are neither natural nor inevitable in the same way as we have found that cholera or the bubonic plague are not necessary calamities.”

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919–1980) Shah of Iran

The Shah's Address to Harvard University - Creation of the Universal Welfare Legion - June 13, 1968 http://members.cybertrails.com/~pahlavi/harvard.html
Speeches, 1968

““Our sense of alternative is the sense that the transcending view which connects us with our Divine Ideal, and which moves us evermore toward harmony with that, is really ever-living, and so affords resources to reduce our defective difference and carry us beyond all temporal actualities. So that when we halt in any stage of these, and act as if our aim and object ended there, and we were there fulfilled, we know that this is false. We know that we have belied our real being, that in our true nature is a fountain out-measuring every possible actuality, that therefore we might have done differently, and that consequently we have contracted guilt”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

guilt, not simply before some external tribunal, be it even God's, but guilt before the more inexorable bar of our own soul.”
Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom, p.370-1

“But is diversity our strength? The less we have in common, the stronger we are? Is that true of families? Is it true in neighborhoods or businesses? Of course not. Then why is it true of America? Nobody knows. Nobody’s even allowed to ask the question.”

Tucker Carlson (1969) American political commentator

[Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution, Tucker, Carlson, 2018, 978-1501183669, Free Press]; [Guess who said it: Tucker Carlson or a far-right shooter, Nathan, Robinson, August 10, 2019, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/10/tucker-carlson-fox-news-united-states-race]
2010s, 2018, Ship of Fools

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