UTOPIA QUOTES
quotations about Utopia
Think of it. We are blessed with technology that would be indescribable to our forefathers. We have the wherewithal, the know-it-all to feed everybody, clothe everybody, and give every human on Earth a chance. We know now what we could never have known before -- that we now have the option for all humanity to make it successfully on this planet in this lifetime. Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment.
R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER
Critical Path
We are at heart so profoundly anarchistic that the only form of state we can imagine living in is Utopian; and so cynical that the only Utopia we can believe in is authoritarian.
LIONEL TRILLING
notebook entry, Partisan Review 50th Anniversary Edition, 1985
Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.
VICTOR HUGO
Intellectual Autobiography
Life without utopia is suffocating, for the multitude at least: threatened otherwise with petrifaction, the world must have a new madness.
EMIL CIORAN
History and Utopia
The great question that utopias are never quite able to solve: how do we get from this flawed and hurtful world we live in, and the flawed and confused people we are, to the rational and cooperative world we want?
JOHN CROWLEY
"Inside Every Utopia Is a Dystopia", Boston Review, April 20, 2017
All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in.
TONI MORRISON
interview, Online NewsHour, March 9, 1998
A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.
OSCAR WILDE
The Soul of Man Under Socialism
When one speaks about utopia, one often speaks about change--but this is the final and ultimate change. It is the change from change to no change.
BORIS GROYS
"Art, Technology, and Humanism", e-flux, May 2017
Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache.... Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.
GEORGE ORWELL
Why Socialists Don't Believe in Fun
The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
The Scarlet Letter
I had a vision of mankind to be:
I saw no grated windows, heard no roar
From iron mouths of war on land or sea;
Ambition broke the sway of peace no more.
Out of the chaos of ill-will had come
Cosmos, the Age of Good, Millennium!
HENRY ABBEY
"The Age of Good"
Heaven is home. Utopia is here. Nirvana is now.
EDWARD ABBEY
Abbey's Road
The weakness of all Utopias is this, that they take the greatest difficulty of man and assume it to be overcome, and then give an elaborate account of the overcoming of the smaller ones. They first assume that no man will want more than his share, and then are very ingenious in explaining whether his share will be delivered by motor-car or balloon.
G. K. CHESTERTON
Heretics
We will go out into the world and plant gardens and orchards to the horizons, we will build roads through the mountains and across the deserts, and terrace the mountains and irrigate the deserts until there will be garden everywhere, and plenty for all, and there will be no more empires or kingdoms, no more caliphs, sultans, emirs, khans, or zamindars, no more kings or queens or princes, no more quadis or mullahs or ulema, no more slavery and no more usury, no more property and no more taxes, no more rich and no more poor, no killing or maiming or torture or execution, no more jailers and no more prisoners, no more generals, soldiers, armies or navies, no more patriarchy, no more caste, no more hunger, no more suffering than what life brings us for being born and having to die, and then we will see for the first time what kind of creatures we really are.
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON
The Years of Rice and Salt
Melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.
GÜNTER GRASS
"On Stasis in Progress", From the Diary of a Snail
Our business here is to be Utopian, to make vivid and credible, if we can, first this facet and then that, of an imaginary whole and happy world.
H. G. WELLS
A Modern Utopia
There is a tyranny in the womb of every Utopia.
BERTRAND DE JOUVENEL
Sovereignty: An Inquiry Into the Political Good
Virtually every prognosticator parrots the same party line: Utopia is just over the hill, but only they know which hill.
LAUREN RUDD
"Polonius' advice to Laertes: Stocks are the way to go", Sarasota Herald-Tribune, May 4, 2017
Utopia is on the horizon. I move two steps closer; it moves two steps further away. I walk another ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps further away. As much as I may walk, I'll never reach it. So what's the point of utopia? The point is this: to keep walking.
EDUARDO GALEANO
attributed, Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World
Every dystopia is masked by a utopia.
MACKENZIE DRAMAN
Pick 7