quotations about Utopia
By their very nature utopias are static. They hate change because it's a direct challenge to their fantasy of perfection.
PAUL MCAULEY
The Quiet War
We're riding to Utopia; road map says we'll be arriving soon
Captains of the old order clinging to the reins
Assuring us these aches inside are only growing pains
But it's a long road out of Eden.
THE EAGLES
"Long Road Out of Eden"
Utopias too transcend the social situation, for they too orient conduct towards elements which the situation, in so far as it is realized at the time, does not contain. But they are not ideologies, i.e., they are not ideologies in the measure and in so far as they succeed through counteractivity in transforming the existing historical reality into one more in accord with their own conceptions.
KARL MANNHEIM
Ideology and Utopia
Utopian visions provide an ideal which people can then struggle to reach.
ERIN MCKENNA
The Task of Utopia: A Pragmatist and Feminist Perspective
Utopia is the grotesque en rose, the need to associate happiness -- that is, the improbable -- with becoming, and to coerce an optimistic, aerial vision to the point where it rejoins its own source: the very cynicism it sought to combat. In short, a monstrous fantasy.
EMIL CIORAN
History and Utopia
If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there'd be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.
NADINE GORDIMER
Burger's Daughter
We announce the birth of a conceptual country, NUTOPIA.
Citizenship of the country can be obtained by declaration of your awareness of NUTOPIA.
NUTOPIA has no land, no boundaries, no passports, only people.
NUTOPIA has no laws other than cosmic.
All people of NUTOPIA are ambassadors of the country.
As two ambassadors of NUTOPIA, we ask for diplomatic immunity and recognition in the United Nations of our country and our people.
JOHN LENNON & YOKO ONO
Declaration of Nutopia
Utopias are often just premature truths.
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE
"Histoire des Girondins", Oeuvres Completes
What we need are alternative horizons that spark the imagination. And I do mean horizons in the plural; conflicting utopias are the lifeblood of democracy, after all.
RUTGER BREGMAN
Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World
No utopia can ever give satisfaction to everyone, all the time. As their material conditions improve, men raise their sights and become discontented with power and possessions that once would have seemed beyond their wildest dreams. And even when the external world has granted all it can, there still remain the searchings of the mind and the longings of the heart.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
Childhood's End
Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.
EMIL CIORAN
History & Utopia
Utopia is the verbal construction of a particular quasi-human community where sociopolitical institutions, norms, and individual relationships are organized according to a more perfect principle than in the author's community, this construction being based on estrangement arising out of an alternative historical hypothesis.
DARKO SUVIN
Metamorphoses of Science Fiction
Human beings will be happier -- not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie -- but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That's my utopia.
KURT VONNEGUT, JR.
interview, Playboy, 1973
Utopia is the impossible, not rendered possible, but shown as necessary.
JEAN-LUC NANCY
"In Place of Utopia", Existential Utopia: New Perspectives on Utopian Thought
Utopia is the idea that another place should be possible in place of this place (and not as another world, a "paradise").
JEAN-LUC NANCY
interview, Existential Utopia: New Perspectives on Utopian Thought
One can say that utopia is the final state of technological development. At this stage, technology becomes self-reflective.
BORIS GROYS
"Art, Technology, and Humanism", e-flux, May 2017
Life is about means not ends. There is no utopia to be gained, there is no end-state that is static and eternal, once accomplished.
CARNE ROSS
The Leaderless Revolution
The ticket to Utopia is real Love that springs from within us.
KATERINA KOSTAKI
The Angels Planet
The equation of utopia with impossibility is emphasized by the argument that utopia is coming to an end. It is because utopia is a static state representing perfection as opposed to progress that Bellamy, Hertzka and Wells are described as peudo-utopians; their utopias "were not so much high flights of the imagination as the calculated product of beneficent forces now at work." Because these utopias "are based in most cases upon proved potentialities, and depend upon normal evolutionary advance for attainment," they are not proper utopias at all.
JOYCE HERTZLER
attributed, The Task of Utopia: A Pragmatist and Feminist Perspective
There are also those who delusively if not enthusiastically surrender their liberty for the mastermind's false promises of human and societal perfectibility. He hooks them with financial bribes in the form of 'entitlements.' And he makes incredible claims about indefectible health, safety, educational, and environmental policies, the success of which is to be measured not in the here and now but in the distant future. For these reasons and more, some become fanatics for the cause. They take to the streets and, ironically, demand their own demise as they protest against their own self-determination and for ever more autocracy and authoritarianism. When they vote, they vote to enchain not only their fellow citizens but, unwittingly, themselves. Paradoxically, as the utopia metastasizes and the society ossifies, elections become less relevant. More and more decisions are made by the masterminds and their experts, who substitute their self-serving and dogmatic judgments -- which are proclaimed righteous and compassionate -- for the individual's self-interests and best interests.
MARK R. LEVIN
Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America