quotations about Utopia
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
Basically, if you're not a utopianist, you're a schmuck.
JONOTHON FELDMAN
attributed, Hollywood Blockbusters: The Anthropology of Popular Movies
In its flexibility and in its wide-open opportunities, this is the total Utopia. Anything that you can conceive of, you can do in this non-world. Nothing can stop you except a total bankruptcy of creativity. The seedbed is waiting. All the circumstances stand ready. The fructifying minerals are literally jumping out of the ground. And nothing grows. And nothing grows. And nothing grows. Well, why doesn't it?
R. A. LAFFERTY
The Day After the World Ends
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
The faith that moves mountains and conceives of a world without slaves immediately transports itself to utopia, separating the reign of God from the reign of Caesar. This reassures Caesar.
EMMANUEL LEVINAS
"Place and Utopia"
Utopia is informed by a desire for immediate gratification that is typical of adolescence.
CHRISTOPHER S. FERNS
Narrating Utopia: Ideology, Gender, Form in Utopian Literature
Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don't know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget.
JAMES BALDWIN
Giovanni's Room
In Utopia, where every man has a right to everything, they all know that if care is taken to keep the public stores full, no private man can want anything; for among them there is no unequal distribution, so that no man is poor, none in necessity; and though no man has anything, yet they are all rich; for what can make a man so rich as to lead a serene and cheerful life, free from anxieties.
THOMAS MORE
Utopia
I can imagine no man who will look with more horror on the End than a conscientious revolutionary who has, in a sense sincerely, been justifying cruelties and injustices inflicted on millions of his contemporaries by the benefits which he hopes to confer on future generations: generations who, as one terrible moment now reveals to him, were never going to exist. Then he will see the massacres, the faked trials, the deportations, to be all ineffaceably real, an essential part, his part, in the drama that has just ended: while the future Utopia had never been anything but a fantasy.
C. S. LEWIS
The World's Last Night
Utopia was here at last: its novelty had not yet been assailed by the supreme enemy of all Utopias--boredom.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
Childhood's End
True, history is full of horrifying forms of utopianism--fascism, communism, Nazism--just as every religion has also spawned fanatical sects. But of one religious radical incites violence, should we automatically write off the whole religion? So why write off the utopianism? Should we simply stop dreaming of a better world altogether?
RUTGER BREGMAN
Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World
In the next few years the struggle will not be between utopia and reality, but between different utopias, each trying to impose itself on reality ... we can no longer hope to save everything, but ... we can at least try to save lives, so that some kind of future, if perhaps not the ideal one, will remain possible.
ALBERT CAMUS
Between Hell and Reason
When I die, I want to die in a Utopia that I have helped to build.
HENRY KUTTNER
The Creatures from Beyond Infinity
Utopia gets a bad rap. If someone calls you or your idea "utopian," they usually mean it as an insult, a synonym for naïve and unrealistic. But everyone should envision an ideal world. Even if you doubt your utopia is attainable, it can serve as a useful thought experiment. Imagine a really good world, and imagine how we can get there. All progress begins with such wishful thinking.
JOHN HORGAN
"What's your utopia?", The Stute, April 28, 2017
None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.
THEODOR WIESENGRUND ADORNO
Minima Moralia
Be vary wary of people who declare that they're going to create heaven on earth, they almost invariably create hell.
FRANÇOIS LELORD
Hector and the Search for Happiness
In our wildest aberrations we dream of an equilibrium we have left behind and which we naively expect to find at the end of our errors. Childish presumption which justifies the fact that child-nations, inheriting our follies, are now directing our history.
ALBERT CAMUS
"Helen's Exile", The Myth of Sisyphus & Other Essays
Utopia is the process of making a better world, the name for one path history can take, a dynamic, tumultuous, agonizing process, with no end. Struggle forever.
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON
Pacific Edge
The political experiments of the 20th century tell us all we need to know: utopias should be regarded not as serious political interventions but as a kind of social poetry.
RICHARD KING
"Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There: 21st century capitalism", The Australian, April 15, 2017
The problem I have with socialist utopias is there's some kind of committees trying to soften outcomes for people. I think that imposes models of outcomes for other people's lives. So in a spiritual sense there's some bit of libertarian in me. But the critical thing for me is moderation. And if you let that go far you do end up with a winner-take-all society that ultimately crushes everybody even worse.
JARON LANIER
"Jaron Lanier: The Internet Destroyed the Middle Class", Salon, May 12, 2013