Quotes & Sayings About Utopia

The Internet is the hope of an integrated world without frontiers, a common world without controlling owners, a world of opportunities and equality. This is a utopia that we have been dreaming about and is a world in which each and every one of us are protagonists of a destiny that we have in our hands. — Laura Chinchilla

And who can deny that Stalin and Mao, not to mention Pol Pot and a host of others, all committed atrocities in the name of a Communist ideology that was explicitly atheistic? Who can dispute that they did their bloody deeds by claiming to be establishing a "new man" and a religion-free utopia? These were mass murders performed with atheism as a central part of their ideological inspiration, they were not mass murders done by people who simply happened to be atheist. — Dinesh D'Souza

Gargantua, at the age of four hundred four score and forty- four years begat his son Pantagruel, from his wife, named Badebec, daughter of the King of the Amaurotes in Utopia, who died in child-birth: because he was marvelously huge and so heavy that he could not come to light without suffocating his mother. — Francois Rabelais

If world peace was as important to people as getting tweeted back by their favorite celebrity, we'd live in a blissful Utopia. — Adam Levine

From being a movement aiming for universal freedom, communism turned into a system of universal despotism. That is the logic of utopia. — John N. Gray

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

The science fiction author, H.G. Wells was an avid supporter of eugenics and a believer in a hierarchy of the races. — A.E. Samaan

Utopianism is, as Plato taught us at the outset, the fire with which we must play because it is the only way we can find out what we are. We need to criticize false understandings of Utopia, but the easy way out provided by realism is deadly. — Allan Bloom

Animal Farm is a warning to every reader. Beware the utopia; beware the perfect solution and the easy slogan; beware those who claim to know what is best for you; beware bombast and dogma; beware the death of doubt; beware those who do not practice what they preach. Beware the chosen. Beware the one and only true path. — George Orwell

A comprehensive utopia may be out of reach, but the effort to realise it shapes the world for the better all the same. The belief may not be true, but it is useful. Belief makes the world. — Rebecca Solnit

The word "utopia" has two meanings. It means both "good place" and "nowhere". That's the way it should be. The happiest places, I think, are the ones that reside just this side of paradise. The perfect person would be insufferable to live with; likewise, we wouldn't want to live in the perfect place, either. "A life time of happiness! No man could bear it: It would be hell on earth," wrote George Bernard Shaw, in his play Man and Superman. — Eric Weiner

Think of it! An opportunity to remake the world! An opportunity to create a steam-driven utopia! To re-educate humanity to despise violence. And what do they do, those incompetents? They opt for the pretty clothes and the empire-mad European imperialist culture of the 19th century. Damn those fools. Those geeks, arrogant, myopic, ivory tower board gamers. Damn them. — Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

'Divergent' was my utopian world. I mean, that wasn't the plan. I never even set out to write dystopian fiction, that's just what I had when I was finished. At the beginning, I was just writing about a place I found interesting and a character with a compelling story, and as I began to build the world, I realized that it was my utopia. — Veronica Roth

She liked who she was becoming, despite the pain and frustration it brought. — B. Barmanbek

To know oneself is to disbelieve utopia. — Michael Novak

The place resembled a new model prison, or one that had achieved a provisional utopia after principled revolt, or maybe a homeless shelter for people with liberal arts degrees. The cages brought to mind those labs with their death-fuming vents near my college studio. These kids were part of some great experiment. It was maybe the same one in which I'd once been a subject. Unlike me, though, or the guinea pigs and hares, they were happy, or seemed happy, or were blogging about how they seemed happy. — Sam Lipsyte

There is utopia and utopia. The kind imposed by an elite in the name of a historical imperative - that utopia is hell. It must lead to terror and then, terror exhausted, to cynicism and torpor. But surely there is another utopia. It cannot be willed either into existence or out of sight, it speaks for our sense of what may yet be. — Irving Howe

Holidays are also an opportunity for kids to unlearn every good habit they've learned during the rest of the year. They don't go to school. They get to stay up past their bedtime. They get candy and presents for doing nothing. Childhood utopia. — Jim Gaffigan

The most awful tyranny is that of the proximate Utopia where the last sins are currently being eliminated and where, tomorrow, there will be no more sins because all the sinners will have been wiped out. p. 22 — Thomas Merton

This false conceptualization has been achieved by using an old socialist trick to obscure the massive environmental improvement that industrial capitalism brought. The trick is to criticize something by comparison to a nonexistent and impossible utopia. Socialists used this technique to criticize capitalism for causing poverty, even though capitalism inherited poverty - and cured it. Yet Marxists would attack capitalism's incredible contribution to human life, including to the life of laborers, by comparing that contribution, not to its predecessors and not to any known alternatives, but to a fictional socialist utopia whose advertised results contradicted everything known (even then) about socialism's destructive nature. — Anonymous

The utopia of the Populists was in the past, not in the future. According to the agrarian myth, the health of the state was proportionate to the degree to which it was dominated by the agricultural class, and this assumption pointed to the superiority of an earlier age. — Richard Hofstadter

Find joy and solace in the simple, and cultivate your utopia by feeling the Tao in every cubic inch of space. — Wayne Dyer

The Revolutionary's Utopia, which in appearance represents a complete break with the past, is always modeled on some image of the Lost Paradise, of a legendary Golden Age ... All utopias are fed from the source of mythology; the social engineers' blueprints are merely revised editions of the ancient text. — Arthur Koestler

I don't wish to defend everything that has been done in the name of Utopia. But I think many of the attacks misconceive its nature and function. As I have tried to suggest, utopia is not mainly about providing detailed blueprints for social reconstruction. Its concern with ends is about making us think about possible worlds. It is about inventing and imagining worlds for our contemplation and delight. It opens up our minds to the possibilities of the human condition. — Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Utopias are often just premature truths. — Alphonse De Lamartine

Diversity is essential to happiness and in Utopia there is hardly any. This is a defect in all planned social systems. — Bertrand Russell

There may well be a few extremists out there somewhere calling for a militant, women-only utopia, but why should this be the definition of 'feminist' when it's already the definition of 'silly'? — Meghan Daum

The commune movement is part of a reawakening of belief in the possibilities for utopia that existed in the nineteenth century and exist again today, a belief that by creating the right social institution, human satisfaction and growth can be achieved. — Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Your friend Plato holds that commonwealths will only be happy when either philosophers rule or rulers philosophize: how remote happiness must appear when philosophers won't even deign to share their thoughts with kings. — Thomas More

The acceptance of woman as object of the desiring male gaze in the visual arts is so universal that for a woman to question or draw attention to this fact is to invite derision, to reveal herself as one who does not understand the sophisticated strategies of high culture and takes art "too literally," and is therefore unable to respond to aesthetic discourses. This is of course maintained within a world - a cultural and academic world - which is dominated by male power and, often unconscious, patriarchal attitudes. In Utopia - that is to say, in a world in which the power structure was such that both men and women equally could be represented clothed or unclothed in a variety of poses and positions without any subconscious implications of dominance or submission - in a world of total and, so to speak, unconscious equality, the female nude would not be problematic. In our world, it is. — Linda Nochlin

You can only rise so far by climbing on others' shoulders, you know. — B. Barmanbek

The future is a choice between Utopia and oblivion. — R. Buckminster Fuller

This director could say many things about duty, and self-respect, and dignity, but she knew none of these meant much in the post-modern world. — B. Barmanbek

Not until the creation and maintenance of decent conditions of life for all people are recognized and accepted as a common obligation of all people and all countries - not until then shall we, with a certain degree of justification, be able to speak of humankind as civilized. — Albert Einstein

Looking out over the lake, I felt enveloped in the most peaceful, loving utopia. — Laurie Kahn

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

Just as a state's police swear to prevent and punish murder, so the signers of the Genocide Convention [in 1948] swore to police a brave new world order. The rhetoric of moral utopia is a peculiar response to genocide. But those were heady days, just after the trials at Nuremberg, when the full scale of the Nazi extermination of Jews all over Europe had been recognized as a fact of which nobody could any longer claim ignorance. The authors and signers of the Genocide Convention knew perfectly well that they had not fought World War II to stop the Holocaust but rather
and often, as in the case of the United States, reluctantly
to contain fascist aggression. What made those victorious powers, which dominated the UN then even more than they do now, imagine that they would act differently in the future? — Philip Gourevitch

The isolation, the separateness, is always a part of any utopia. — Toni Morrison

Americans love marriage too much. We rush into mariage with abandon, expecting a micro-Utopia on earth. We pile all our needs onto it, our expectations, neuroses, and hopes. In fact, we've made marriage into the panda bear of human social institutions: we've loved it to death. — Barbara Ehrenreich

I believe that he who sows utopia will reap reality. — Carlo Petrini

There was another thought which a scanning of those tiny electronic headlines often invoked. The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry or depressing its contents seemed to be. Accidents, crimes, natural and man-made disasters, threats of conflict, gloomy editorials - these still seemed to be the main concern of the millions of words being sprayed into the ether. Yet Floyd also wondered if this was altogether a bad thing; the newspapers of Utopia, he had long ago decided, would be terribly dull. From — Arthur C. Clarke

The president's dream of a worldwide liberal utopia is going to undermine the security of the United States. — Peter T. King

It was both terrifying and glorious in it's intensity. It was love. — Melissa Landers

None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace. — Theodor Adorno

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

She said it was different, because the balance of power was equal between women so sex was an even-steven transaction. I said "even-steven" was a sexist phrase, if she was going to be like that, and anyway that argument was outdated. She said I had trivialized the issue and if I thought it was outdated, I was living with my head in the sand.
(...)
I said there was more than one way of living with your head in the sand and that if Moira thought she could create Utopia by shutting herself up in a women-only enclave she was sadly mistaken. Men were not just going to go away, I said. You couldn't just ignore them . — Margaret Atwood

I grew up in a utopia, I did. California when I was a child was a child's paradise, I was healthy, well fed, well clothed, well housed. I went to school and there were libraries with all the world in them and after school I played in orange groves and in Little League and in the band and down at the beach and every day was an adventure ... I grew up in utopia. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Writers like Aldous Huxley and George Orwell have imagined the sort of scientific utopia which is coming to pass, but already their nightmare fancies are hopelessly out of date. A vast, air-conditioned, neon-lighted, glass-and-chromium broiler-house begins to take shape, in which geneticists select the best stocks to fertilise, and watch over the developing embryo to ensure that all possibilities of error and distortion are eliminated. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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

So we work for better political and economic systems, knowing that sin precludes any earthly utopia now, but rejoicing in the assurance that the kingdom of shalom that the Messiah has already begun will one day prevail, and the kingdoms of this world will become the kingdom of our Lord. — Ronald J. Sider

Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness. — Karl Polanyi

Long ago it had been discovered that without some crime or disorder, Utopia soon became unbearably dull. — Arthur C. Clarke

Communism is Utopia, that is nowhere. It is the avatar of all our religious eschatologies: the coming of the Messiah, the second coming of Christ, nirvana. It is not a historical prospect, but a current mythology. Socialism, by contrast, is a realizable historical system which may one day be instituted in the world. — Immanuel Wallerstein

That democratic socialism, the great utopia of the last few generations, is not only unachievable, but that to strive for it produces something so utterly different that few of those who wish it would be prepared to accept the consequences, many will not believe until the connection has been laid bare in all its aspects. — Friedrich August Von Hayek

The mystique of rock climbing is climbing; you get to the top of a rock glad it's over but really wish it would go on forever. The justification of climbing is climbing, like the justification of poetry is writing; you don't conquer anything except things in yourself ... . The act of writing justifies poetry. Climbing is the same: recognizing that you are a flow. The purpose of the flow is to keep on flowing, not looking for a peak or utopia but staying in the flow. It is not a moving up but a continuous flowing; you move up to keep the flow going. There is no possible reason for climbing except the climbing itself; it is a self-communication. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Who would want the socialist Utopia? Especially if you were at all artistic - you want all those inequalities, because that's what makes life interesting. — Martin Amis

I do not choose to be a common man.
It is my right to be uncommon - if I can. I seek opportunity - not security. I do not wish to be a kept citizen, humbled and dulled by having the state look after me.
I want to take the calculated risk; to dream and to build, to fail and to succeed.
I refuse to barter incentive for a dole. I prefer the challenges of life to the guaranteed existence; the thrill of fulfillment to the stale calm of utopia.
I will not trade freedom for beneficence nor my dignity for a handout. I will never cower before any master nor bend to any threat.
It is my heritage to stand erect, proud and unafraid; to think and act for myself, enjoy the benefit of my creations, and to face the world boldly and say, this I have done. — Dean Alfange

A utopia cannot, by definition, include boredom, but the 'utopia' we are living in is boring. — Lars Fr. H. Svendsen

The really damaging thing is that the objectives, the goals of the people on the left are not possible. There is no utopia. — Rush Limbaugh

Bureaucracies public and private appear
for whatever historical reasons
to be organized in such a way as to guarantee that a significant proportion of actors will not be able to perform their tasks as expected. It's in this sense that I've said one can fairly say that bureaucracies are utopian forms of organization. After all, is this not what we always say of utopians: that they have a naive faith in the perfectibility of human nature and refuse to deal with humans as they actually are? Which is, are we not also told, what leads them to set impossible standards and then blame the individuals for not living up to them? — David Graeber

Mystery. The strangeness of place so necessary to some creative spirits. A perfect mixture of the classical utopia and the pagan mystery. — Dan Simmons

Utopia's quite another land;
In her enterprising movements,
She is England
with improvements — W.S. Gilbert

The movie says, You can lose your job and your way and still rescue yourself. 'Larry Crowne' creates a self-excavated utopia, and I love that idea, that message. — Julia Roberts

The world is now too dangerous for anything less than utopia. — R. Buckminster Fuller

Long walks on the beach are the supposed holy grail of a romantic evening. The beach becomes a kind of utopia - the place where all our dreams come true. — Roxane Gay

To expect, indeed, that the freedom of trade should ever be entirely restored in Great Britain, is as absurd as to expect that an Oceana or Utopia should never be established in it. — Adam Smith

Utopia was here at last: its novelty had not yet been assailed by the supreme enemy of all Utopias - boredom. — Arthur C. Clarke

The wise don't live in Utopia, they have their feet firm on the real ground — Bangambiki Habyarimana

Anarchism is no patent solution for all human problems, no Utopia of a perfect social order, as it has often been called, since on principle it rejects all absolute schemes and concepts. It does not believe in any absolute truth, or in definite final goals for human development, but in an unlimited perfectibility of social arrangements and human conditions which are always straining after higher forms of expression, and to which for this reason one can assign no definite terminus nor set any fixed goal. — Rudolf Rocker

Not only America but all countries should think together about how the enormous might of the sole remaining superpower should be used. We need a leadership that is based on partnership, a leadership that unites nations and makes it possible to solve the problems of the globe together. Otherwise, we will have another Gold Rush for a superpower that wants to gain even greater advantages, that wants to gain an absolutely new position for itself. That would lead to a perverse utopia. — Mikhail Gorbachev

In the midst of this utopia, which only your fellow lone voyagers would perceive, you used to transgress society's rules unknowingly, and no one would hold you accountable for it. You would mistakenly enter private residences, go to concerts to which you had not been invited, eat at community banquets where you could only guess the community's identity when they started giving speeches. Had you behaved like this in your own country, you would have been taken for a liar or a fool. But the improbable ways of a foreigner are accepted. Far from your home, you used to taste the pleasure of being mad without being alienated, of being an imbecile without renouncing your intelligence, of being an impostor without culpability. — Edouard Leve

Normally, when you challenge the conventional wisdom - that the current economic and political system is the only possible one - the first reaction you are likely to get is a demand for a detailed architectural blueprint of how an alternative system would work, down to the nature of its financial instruments, energy supplies, and policies of sewer maintenance. Next, you are likely to be asked for a detailed program of how this system will be brought into existence. Historically, this is ridiculous. When has social change ever happened according to someone's blueprint? It's not as if a small circle of visionaries in Renaissance Florence conceived of something they called "capitalism," figured out the details of how the stock exchange and factories would someday work, and then put in place a program to bring their visions into reality. In fact, the idea is so absurd we might well ask ourselves how it ever occurred to us to imagine this is how change happens to begin. — David Graeber

Say "Yes" to the seedlings and a giant forest cleaves the sky. Say "Yes" to the universe and the planets become your neighbors. Say "Yes" to dreams of love and freedom. It is the password to utopia. — Brooks Atkinson

Musical myths speak with authority about our society, its fragility, its strengths, its desires, and its limits. Music becomes a wise version of the utopian messenger, pleasing us with his account of an ideal land but also warning us, in his tones, of all the dangers. — Edward Rothstein

They fathomed principle; they attached themselves to right. They longed for the absolute, they caught glimpses of the infinite realisations; the absolute, by its very rigidity, pushes the mind towards the boundless, makes it float in the illimitable. There is nothing like dream to create the future. Utopia today, flesh and blood tomorrow. — Victor Hugo

What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline. — Theodor Adorno

Literature is my Utopia ... No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book-friends — Helen Keller

A case could be made that even the shift into R&D on information technologies and medicine was not so much a reorientation towards market-driven consumer imperatives, but part of an all-out effort to follow the technological humbling of the Soviet Union with total victory in the global class war: not only the imposition of absolute U.S. military dominance overseas, but the utter rout of social movements back home. The technologies that emerged were in almost every case the kind that proved most conducive to surveillance, work discipline, and social control. Computers have opened up certain spaces of freedom, as we're constantly reminded, but instead of leading to the workless utopia Abbie Hoffman or Guy Debord imagined, they have been employed in such a way as to produce the opposite effect. — David Graeber

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

To explore the unknown and the familiar, distant and near and to record in detail with the eyes of a child, any beauty, (of the flesh or otherwise) horror, irony, traces of utopia or Hell. Select your team with care, but when in doubt, take on some new crew and give them a chance. But avoid at all costs fluctuations of sincerity with your best people. — Dan Eldon

Basically, if you're not a utopianist, you're a schmuck. — Jonathan Feldman

The system - the American one, at least - is a vast and noble experiment. It has been polestar and exemplar for other nations. But from kindergarten until she graduates from college the girl is treated in it exactly like her brothers. She studies the same subjects, becomes proficient at the same sports. Oh, it is a magnificent lore she learns, education for the mind beyond anything Jane Austen or Saint Theresa or even Mrs. Pankhurst ever dreamed. It is truly Utopian. But Utopia was never meant to exist on this disheveled planet. — Phyllis McGinley

The genius of stable societies is that they achieve stability without stagnation, repetition without monotony, conformity with originality, obedience with liberty. — Hugh Nibley

When communism failed, it wasn't a good idea that had gone wrong, it was a bad idea that had been sustained with incredible determination in the face of all the commonsense arguments, and at the cost of 20 million lives at least, in Russia, to build the socialist Utopia. — Martin Amis

That the utopia I thought the online world created, where people don't have to be ashamed of what they love and could connect with each other regardless of what they looked like, was really a place where people could steep themselves in their own worldview until they became willfully blind to everyone else's. I — Felicia Day

But the Modern Utopia must not be static but kinetic, must shape not as a permanent state but as a hopeful stage, leading to a long ascent of stages. Nowadays we do not resist and overcome the great stream of things, but rather float upon it. We build now not citadels, but ships of state. — H.G.Wells

Failing all else, their last resort will be: 'This was good enough for our ancestors, and who are we to question their wisdom?' Then they'll settle back in their chairs, with an air of having said the lst word on the subject
as if it would be a major disaster for anyone to be caught being wiser than his ancestors! — Thomas More

Faith means walking on the waters. — Julien Green

Only those capable of envisaging utopia will be fit for the decisive battle, that of recovering all the humanity we have lost.
— Ernesto Sabato

You can be with the 'truth' or you can cheat yourself by believing the big lie in front of you is the 'truth'. Those who are with the 'truth' are a minority, whom you may call Utopians. — Kandathil Sebastian

Utopia would mean a park - some large, some small - every four or five blocks. — Thomas Hoving

It's wrong to deprive someone else of a pleasure so that you can enjoy one yourself, but to deprive yourself of a pleasure so that you can add to someone else's enjoyment is an act of humanity by which you always gain more than you lose. — Thomas More

What could be the utopia for the present age?
To begin with, I would want all of human order to make a partnership, beginning in schools. It is atrocious that the children leave the partnership and go to be educated by a professor, just a man or a woman. This negates partnership. Classes should be taught by couples of both sexes, and children should be educated by a man and a woman ...
... not necessarily a husband and wife. This is what I would do as a first political measure to improve social life: all human activities would have to be carried out in complimentary pairs. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

To-day well, my Utopia, if ever I framed one, would be a land where the laws demanded that people should be vicious. Then one would be able to count at any rate on a little virtue. If no man might live with a woman in any but an irregular union, there would be at once quite a run on honest matrimony and the Law Courts would be full of desperately wicked monogamists; while if every one was expected to steal and swindle, there would soon be an extensive criminal class who respected property. — Edward Verrall Lucas

I'm fascinated by the First World War because it was supposed to be the war to end all wars, and it was the biggest conflagration that this particular planet had seen. There was a lot of talk about utopia and how it was possible, and then, because of these events that for one reason or another couldn't be stopped, the idea of utopia went out the window. — Glenn Close

Melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin. — Gunter Grass

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

If man chooses oblivion, he can go right on leaving his fate to his political leaders. If he chooses Utopia, he must initiate an enormous education program - immediately, if not sooner. — R. Buckminster Fuller

Ebenezer Howard's vision of the Garden City would seem almost feudal to us. He seems to have thought that members of the industrial working classes would stay neatly in their class, and even at the same job within their class; that agricultural workers would stay in agriculture; that businessmen (the enemy) would hardly exist as a significant force in his Utopia; and that planners could go about their good and lofty work, unhampered by rude nay-saying from the untrained. It was the very fluidity of the new nineteenth-century industrial and metropolitan society, with its profound shiftings of power, people and money, that agitated Howard so deeply — Jane Jacobs

Reality is what people who lack vision see. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana