Quotes & Sayings About Dystopia

Technique has taken over the whole of civilization. Death, procreation, birth all submit to technical efficiency and systemization. — Jacques Ellul

... our world did not fall because we did not believe in fairness ... our world fell because it could no longer support the enormous weight we had put upon it, in the name of fairness. — Leot Felton

Be they pharaohs or freeholders, barons or farmers, landowners have been the most capable, most intrepid, and most assertive members of civilized society. — David Marusek

I'm just sorry. Sorry that there won't be any more camping trips for kids or rock bands or even new books to read. No more movies or fresh bags of popcorn. It really sucks when you think about it. Of course, there is the possibility that we might be able to win this war, but not for a very long time. Probably longer than you and I will ever exist in this world."
"I try not to think about it."
"Sometimes it's all I ever think about. — Jeyn Roberts

He never realized how noisy American silence was until all the gadgets died. — Marcus Sakey

By the end of Barber's talk, this event she's celebrating sounds like a product of the imagination of some master of speculative fiction like Philip K. Dick or Ray Bradbury - a mad dystopia in which feminist dreams have led to a forest full of separate clearings in which more and more women keep to smaller and smaller groups for fear of encountering difference. — Bruce Bawer

The greywastes was a basin overflowing with insanity, the very earth underneath me was only surviving because it was too mad to know it had died — Quil Carter

Suddenly exhausted, she closes her eyes and slips into nightmares again. Graveyards rising out of the ocean. Her friends' corpses in the light of their burning school. Skeletons ripping open men's chests and crawling inside. She endures it patiently, waiting for the horror film to end and the theater to go dark, those precious few hours of blackout that are her only respite. — Isaac Marion

This was my world: cold, tangled and distorted. -Keira — S.L. Wallace

Because of the foulness of her mother's emotional river, a current which ran swift, changing its path without warning ... — Tamara Rose Blodgett

Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal.And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day, every day, sleeping its life away. — Ray Bradbury

Our contemporary Western society, in spite of its material, intellectual and political progress, is increasingly less conducive to mental health, and tends to undermine the inner security, happiness, reason and the capacity for love in the individual; it tends to turn him into an automaton who pays for his human failure with increasing mental sickness, and with despair hidden under a frantic drive for work and so called pleasure. — Erich Fromm

Because King Silas
always gets what he wants, even if he doesn't want
anything more than to fuck with you. — Quil Carter

The life where nothing was ever unexpected. Or inconvenient. Or unusual. The life without colour, pain or past. — Lois Lowry

I'll go over again and again until I've finally crossed to where he is — Ally Condie

Wilder went into his sons' bedroom. Glad to see Wilder, they banged their empty feeding-bowls with their plastic machine-pistols. They were dressed in miniature paratroopers' camouflage suits and tin helmets
the wrong outfit, Wilder reflected, in light of what had been taking place in the high-rise. The correct combat costume was stockbrokers' pin-stripe, briefcase and homburg. — J.G. Ballard

Oh, so it's not enough that I told you; it has to be in the right setting?" I raise my eyebrows. "Next time should I brew some tea and make sure the lighting is right too? — Veronica Roth

If you listen closely you will hear the spirits sigh
a lesson lost on humans; an enchanting lullaby:
Mercy lies in nature's hands and bound to it we grow.
Of the earth we came to be and of the earth we'll go. — Nicoline Evans

All the enormous machines that keep full Citizens comfortable far above us in their glittering towers, all the infrastructure of power, of fuel, of commerce and industry - all of it happens below. Made possible with our hands. With our bodies.
With our lives.
I would have done anything to escape.
I got my chance. I made it out - but the price was loneliness. — Julio Alexi Genao

We're a nonviolent collective working to undermine the Trust and free the Badlands. Once the Trust is exposed as lying and corrupt, we believe Edenites will do the right thing. Open the borders. Save the Badlands." Ling lowers her voice with deliberate control. "Kudzu is going to destroy something called Aevum. — Georgia Clark

I'm sorry if humans mistreated your people in the past, but if we don't join together now, it's time to admit that we're all just keeping busy while we wait for the Earth to die. — Andy Goldman

You're a kid. I didn't know we taught kids manners anymore. — Christine Amsden

Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us ... But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture's being drained by laughter? — Neil Postman

Homo sapiens! The name itself was an irony. They had not been wise at all, but incredibly stupid. Lords of the Earth with their great gray brains, their thinking minds had placed them above all other forms of life. Yet it had not been thought that compelled them to act, but emotion. From the dawn of their evolution they had killed, and conquered, and subdued. They had committed atrocities on others of their kind, ravaged the land, polluted and destroyed, left millions to starve in Third World countries, and finished it all with a nuclear holocaust. The mutants were right. Intelligent creatures did not commit genocide, or murder the environment on which they were dependent. — Louise Lawrence

Never trust a man who sits, uninvited, at the head of the table in another man's home. — Cecelia Ahern

This is the legacy of a compassionate bunch. Our fate now rests on the whims of men. — Leot Felton

Ideas combined with courage can change the world. — David Litwack

I could be listening to Painted Red weave the stories of the saints in her rich roomy voice, and beginning to see how all those stories were in some way one story: a simple story about being alive, and being a man; a story that, simple as it was, couldn't itself be told. — John Crowley

People are torn between the pathetic safety of not knowing, and the desire to know. — Lawrence Thornton

There is no sanctity. This is the downfall of innocence. — Nadege Richards

Vaughn is talking about the heat, and his voice is so excited that it breaks into whispers at times. He loves his madness the way a bird loves the sky. — Lauren DeStefano

Oh, I wonder if there's another way. — S.L. Wallace

Elijah blinked in dazzling sunlight and took a deep breath. The sweet-pepper scent of meadow grass told him immediately where he was. Winded, he skidded to a halt as the portal spat him out. Above him stretched skies of cornflower blue, dotted with threadbare white clouds sailing over like cotton galleons on the summer breeze. — Sharon Sant

And of course she had studied the civilization that had immediately preceded her own - the civilization that had mistaken the functions of the system, and had used it for bringing people to things, instead of for bringing things to people. Those funny old days, when men went for change of air instead of changing the air in their rooms! — E. M. Forster

I've spent the last fifteen years of my life railing against the game of soccer, an exercise that has been lauded as "the sport of the future" since 1977. Thankfully, that future dystopia has never come. — Chuck Klosterman

In the future, violence would clearly become a valuable form of social cement. — J.G. Ballard

Freedom is taken for granted by the free and longed for by those who never had it. But for those who have lost it, the loss burns like the hottest flame. — S.W. Lothian

The greatest guilt of today is that of people who accept collectivism by moral default; the people who seek protection from the necessity of taking a stand, by refusing to admit to themselves the nature of that which they are accepting; the people who support plans specifically designed to achieve serfdom, but hide behind the empty assertion that they are lovers of freedom, with no concrete meaning attached to the word; the people who believe that the content of ideas need not be examined, that principles need not be defined, and that facts can be eliminated by keeping one's eyes shut. They expect, when they find themselves in a world of bloody ruins and concentration camps, to escape moral responsibility by wailing: But I didn't mean this! — Ayn Rand

As I ran a few blades of grass between my fingers, enjoying the breeze as it caressed my face, I contemplated the cycle of life. As this year would host the long anticipated arrival of the Mayan Doomsday, marking the end of their long count calendar, I wasn't alone in my ponderings. The whole world was focused on the potential that we would be the last generation; the witnesses of the world's end. — J.M. Northup

Gods have become like us, ergo, we have become like gods. And to you, my unknown planetary readers, we will come to you, to make your life as divinely rational and exact as ours. — Yavgeny Zamyatin -We

It may be that the best we can hope for when it comes to utopias is that they be held at arm's length and regarded as aesthetic constructions, in which various proportions are neatly worked out, contradictions eliminated, and outside intrusions minimized. They are fictions, artifacts of culture. And we should be wary if they ever become much more. — Edward Rothstein

Such is the control, and such the public mentality, enjoyed by the Swedish planners. The rulers of the Soviet Union, although favoured by despotic power, are not so fortunate. Obstructively resentful of officialdom, the Russian, in the words of the Spanish saying, has always known how orders are 'to be obeyed but not carried out'. To the Swede, that sort of compromise is downright immoral. His elected leaders have received those political blessings denied the autocrats in the Kremlin: compliant citizens and an unopposed bureaucracy. — Roland Huntford

That's how we stay young these days: murder and suicide. — Eugene Ionesco

When we talk about dystopias, especially in young adult fiction, a lot of them are essentially science fictional futures. They aren't necessarily tied to the traditional concept of dystopia. And so in that space, my impression is that kids love reading about weird, wild, adventurous places, and dystopia fits that bill. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Impossible is such a stupid word. — Tahereh Mafi

At the very moment when man is on the verge of realizing his hope, he begins to lose it. — Erich Fromm

We urgently need to do - and I mean actually do - something radical to avert a global catastrophe. But I don't think we will.
I think we're fucked. — Stephen Emmott

(ghost of)ACHILLES: How can I force obedience on this? In other times I've used the fear of death to make a woman bow herself to me. If not the fear of her own death, then fear for someone else, a husband or a child. How can I bend this woman to my will?
(ghost of)POLYXENA: I think I will not bend.
IPHIGENIA: You see, it's as we've tried to tell you, Great Achilles. Women are no good to you dead. — Sheri S. Tepper

Freedom breeds uncertainty; uncertainty invites chaos. — R.J. Leahy

Bad movies: they can be tatty classics of crazed ineptitude, like Edward D. Wood's 'Glen or Glenda' and 'Plan 9 from Outer Space,' or big-budget misfires like the 1987 'Ishtar,' a would-be comedy that sent Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman on a Hope-Crosby Road to Dystopia. — Richard Corliss

Undertown. You maybe don't remember it. Your clothes don't smell of it. Of the filth, the rot. The stinking hell of vapor and grime. The warren of hovels and the millions of us starving in them, defending whatever pathetic collection of things we call 'ours' - sometimes to the death, yet still doing little more than waiting to die. — Julio Alexi Genao

The collective sign of relief heaved on V-J Day ought to have inspired Hollywood to release a flood of "happily ever after" films. But some victors didn't feel too good about their spoils. They'd seen too much by then. Too much warfare, too much poverty, too much greed, all in the service of rapacious progress. A bundle of unfinished business lingered from the Depression - nagging questions about ingrained venality, mean human nature, and the way unchecked urban growth threw society dangerously out of whack. Writers and directors responded by delivering gritty, bitter dramas that slapped our romantic illusions in the face and put the boot to the throat of the smug bourgeoisie. Still, plenty of us took it - and liked it. — Eddie Muller

Yesterday, here in the middle of the City, I saw a wolf turn into a Russian ex-gymnast and hand over a business card that read YOUR OWN PERSONAL TRANSHUMAN SECURITY WHORE! STERILIZED INNARDS! ACCEPTS ALL CREDIT CARDS to a large man who had trained attack cancers on his face and possessed seventy-five indentured Komodo Dragons instead of legs. And they had sex. Right in front of me. And six of the Komodo Dragons spat napalm on my new shoes. — Warren Ellis

Inside the room there sat a rocker, which she sat on, and which had rocked her while she sipped the beer, because in spite of herself she had become so giddy to have so quickly relieved her heart that she allowed herself to lean backwards while in the rocker, which had made it possible for the rocker to rock her, although it was not her intention to be so rocked. Also there stood an ironing board with a still hot iron on it that was burning a yellow shift, and there was, among several items that were not as noticeable to the woman, and yet were noticeable enough to at least bear mention, a fake man.
"I hope you don't mind me asking," said the woman who lived in the room, but then while in her chair she nodded off. — Justin Dobbs

There has to be beauty left in the world, Julia," said Kiyu. "Otherwise we have nothing. — Erica Lindquist

Writing a novel is agony. — George Orwell

What we are probably given is a mixture of truth and untruth. It's anybody's guess as to which part is which and how much there is of each. — Ira Levin

I think that sometimes the only real thing is now. — Suzanne Young

A mix of revenge, sadness and anger funnels into a decision that's so simple and neat, it could fit in my pocket. I will help Kudzu destroy Aevum. Just like Magnus destroyed my mother. — Georgia Clark

The antagonists of finance's future, the diaboli ex machina, may have no face at all. — Usman W. Chohan

I catch movement from the corner of my eye. A tell slender boy stands near us, just a few feet away. Adrenaline bangs through my system. I shove Abel behind me and whip my knife from where I'd hidden it in my boot. Who the hell are you? — Georgia Clark

So, in the end, above ground you must have the Haves, pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty, and below ground the Have-nots, the Workers getting continually adapted to the conditions of their labour. Once they were there, they would no doubt have to pay rent, and not a little of it, for the ventilation of their caverns; and if they refused, they would starve or be suffocated for arrears. Such of them as were so constituted as to be miserable and rebellious would die; and, in the end, the balance being permanent, the survivors would become as well adapted to the conditions of underground life, and as happy in their way, as the Upper-world people were to theirs. — H.G.Wells

Through the window I looked across the oil-black Tigris at the Green Zone, lit up like Disneyland in Dystopia. I thought about J.G. Ballard's novel High Rise, where a state-of-the-art London tower block is the vertical stage for civilization to unpeel itself until nothing but primal violence remains. — David Mitchell

The paths people choose in life can lead to the creation or destruction of people, places, things, and relationships. The future is uncertain, but what is certain is there will be change. — Stephen Black

Dystopia is my playground. — Jean Nicole Rivers

Her demon had pursued and seduced him. She hoped he hadn't placed too much importance on that. — Paula Altenburg

In 1954 the gulag at Kengir witnessed an uprising by Christian and Muslim prisoners. The guards were driven out, and for forty days worship was freely practiced in the camp. Solzhenitsyn later documented the atmosphere of elation and idealism which prevailed in this doomed island of faith: the Muslims put on turbans and robes again, and 'the grey-black camp was a blaze of color'. The Chechens made kites from which they showered the neighboring villages with messages about the evils of the atheist system. Many marriages were celebrated. Survivors recall the forty days as a testimony to a possible way of living which had been suffocated by dreary unbelief. Delight in the present, and the knowledge of heaven outweighed the awareness of Khrushchev's inevitable revenge. The rebels were crushed under the attacks of tanks, but in the long term, this same spiritual outweighing insured the atheist dystopia's downfall. — Abdal Hakim Murad

This war ends, then so do the taxpayer-funded contracts, the drumbeats in the media, the nice Combatant faces, and the patriotic cause to lull the civilians and shame the dissenters. The other thing that comes to an end is all the justification for why this country's run the way it is. People will wonder why their paychecks are still getting halved to pay off the men who own their utility companies, their roads, their national parks. They'll wonder why they've got to work eighty-hour weeks to support the folks who took their houses and destroyed the middle-class jobs. There's not going to be an enemy to point a finger at anymore. People will see the real problem. — S.J. Kincaid

Society can serve its citizens only to the extent that it knows them. — David Marusek

A fictional Dystopia is better than a fake Utopia. — Robert Friedrich

Before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity. — Jeffrey Rosen

We imagine all these postapocalyptic, class-stratified, new-world-order techno-futures. But actually the real world, the world we live in, this is the dystopia. — Elan Mastai

Twenty years earlier, in a life [Kirsten] mostly couldn't remember, she had had a small nonspeaking role in a short-lived Toronto production of King Lear. Now she walked in sandals whose soles had been cut from an automobile tire, three knives in her belt. — Emily St. John Mandel

Life involves a lot of unknowns. — S.L. Wallace

I think it means that everyone is necessary. As long as a person finds some way to contribute to society, it doesn't matter which task he chooses. We're all important. — S.L. Wallace

If you put enough sheep together you have a herd- a force to be reckoned with. — Maria V. Snyder

Perfect crime,' he said softly.
'Yes?'
'Persuade an innocent, idealistic young girl that the future of the human race depends on her sacrificing her own life. She will come into hospital as trustingly as a lamb to the slaughter. She will welcome the implantation of a baby that will kill her. She'll lie there while her brain is destroyed for nine whole months, and no police will arrest you, no court will judge you, you'll get away scot free. At the end of nine months she'll be taken off life support and she'll be completely dead. And no one will be blamed. — Jane Rogers

But thought we'll know forward and we've known backward, we will never know the present. This moment and the next on and even the one that would've been right now are gone, already passed, and all we're left with are these tired bodies, the only proof that we've lived through time and survived it.
It'll be worth it, though, in the end.
Fighting for a lifetime of this. — Tahereh Mafi

A glacial chill rushes through Gage. He whips around just in time to see arms clutch Summer around the middle and drag her into the dark. Panic seizes him, and he takes off after her, regardless of the chaos brewing behind him. Her cry of surprise echoes all around them, drilling into his bones. — Laura Kreitzer

How shrunk, how dwindled, in our times
Creation's mighty seed -
For Man has broke the Fellowship
With murder, lust, and greed. — Margaret Atwood

Creed must have responded in kind, because with a gasp, she broke off the kiss. Time crawled to a standstill, then shifted to a sprint. Nieve shoved the gun lodged between them into his ribs. His hand still covered hers, and with the well-trained instincts of an assassin, he jerked the gun to the side so that the bullet she fired embedded into the ground, kicking up dirt, and not in his heart. — Paula Altenburg

That's the funny thing about guns; even untrained hands can feel powerful using them. But take that gun away and you're left with nothing but a coward whose only skill is how to blindly pull a trigger. — Jennifer Wilson

I fell silent after that. I didn't want to talk about such things anymore, at least today. My chest already hurt and I was trying to keep my mind calm. I didn't want to think of a future so bleak and dark. I had plans for my future and they didn't involve the world ending or society collapsing. — J.M. Northup

Beyond the queues, the vacancy screens listed jobs in a multitude of languages. Invariably, they were low-paid and short-term dead-ends. Nearby, people in headphones sat at a bank of machines: the blind and the illiterate force-fed with 'opportunities' by soothing machine voices. On the far wall, in large print, a poster declared: BEGGARS CANNOT BE CHOOSERS. — Mark Cantrell

His style as a writer places him in the category of the immortals, and his courage as a critic outlives the bitter battles in which he engaged. As a result, we use the word 'Orwellian' in two senses: The first describes a nightmare state, a dystopia of untrammelled power; the second describes the human qualities that are always ranged in resistance to such regimes, and that may be more potent and durable than we sometimes dare to think. — Christopher Hitchens

In movies and in television the robots are always evil. I guess I am not into the whole brooding cyberpunk dystopia thing. — Daniel H. Wilson

I never thought it would get this bad. I never thought the Reestablishment would take things so far. They're incinerating culture, the beauty of diversity. The new citizens of our world will be reduced to nothing but numbers, easily interchangeable, easily removable, easily destroyed for disobedience.
We have lost our humanity. — Tahereh Mafi

They say that when people still rode on vehicles powered by oil, they could go anywhere they wanted. — Yoshiyuki Sadamoto

Moreover, people have become accustomed to reading to escape as opposed to reading to think. — Leigh M. Lane

So as near as I could tell the end of the world began roughly about the time that Billy Carver's butt rang about halfway through the War of 1812. — Steve Vernon

Find our way out, Greenie. Solve the buggin' Maze and find our way out. — James Dashner

Modesty is invisibility ... Never forget it. To be seen - to be seen - is to be ... penetrated. What you must be girls, is impenetrable. — Margaret Atwood

I can almost see the processes whirrling clunkily in his singularix, as his excited nervous system battled with his logic circuits. — Georgia Clark

It's more eerie to be alone in a city that's lit up and functioning than one that's a tomb. If everything were silent, one could almost pretend to be in nature. A forest. A meadow. Crickets and birdsong. But the corpse of civilization is as restless as the creatures that now roam the graveyards. — Isaac Marion

To enslave an individual troubles your consciences, Archivist, but to enslave a clone is no more troubling than owning the latest six-wheeler ford, ethically. Because you cannot discern our differences, you assume we have none. But make no mistake: even same-stem fabricants cultured in the same wombtank are as singular as snowflakes. — David Mitchell

Only the sweetest of the sweet would bring brownies to the apocalypse. — Shelly Crane

Her life has seen little light. She is twelve years old but has a woman's weathered poise. Her abyss-blue eyes have a piercing focus that some adults find unsettling. [ ... ] She has fired a gun into a human head. She has watched a pile of bodies set alight. She has starved and thirsted, stolen food and given it away, and glimpsed the meaning of life by watching it end over and over. — Isaac Marion

Time for the world to end. — Rick Yancey

Anything but chicken, and some honesty on the side, please. — S.L. Wallace

Today I feel no wish to demonstrate that sanity is impossible. On the contrary, though I remain no less sadly certain than in the past that sanity is a rather rare phenomenon, I am convinced that it can be achieved and would like to see more of it. — Aldous Huxley