Utopian quotes:

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  • Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labeled Utopian. -- Emma Goldman
  • 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
  • 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
  • If work and leisure are soon to be subordinated to this one utopian principle - absolute busyness - then utopia and melancholy will come to coincide: an age without conflict will dawn, perpetually busy - and without consciousness. -- Gunter Grass
  • The Venus Project is neither Utopian nor Orwellian, nor does it reflect the dreams of impractical idealists. Instead, it presents attainable goals requiring only the intelligent application of what we already know. The only limitations are those which we impose upon ourselves. -- Jacque Fresco
  • Although images of perfection in people's personal lives can cause unhappiness, images of perfect societies - utopian images - can cause monstrous evil. In fact, forcefully changing society to conform to societal images was the greatest cause of evil in the twentieth century. -- Dennis Prager
  • TV is sometimes accused of encouraging fantasies. Its real problem, though, is that it encourages-enforces, almost-a brute realism. It is anti-Utopian in the extreme. We're discouraged from thinking that, except for a few new products, there might be a better way of doing things. -- Bill McKibben
  • 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
  • The complete destruction of traditional marriage and the nuclear family is the 'revolutionary or utopian' goal of feminism. -- Kate Millett
  • Tree planting is always a utopian enterprise, it seems to me, a wager on a future the planter doesn't necessarily expect to witness. -- Michael Pollan
  • The utopian schemes of leveling and a community of goods, are as visionary and impractical as those which vest all property in the crown. These ideas are arbitrary, despotic, and, in our government unconstitutional. -- Samuel Adams
  • I've decided to recast myself as Utopian. I like this landscape of the M25 and Heathrow. I like airfreight offices and rent-a-car bureaus. I like dual carriageways. When I see a CCTV camera, I know I'm safe. -- J. G. Ballard
  • Hunger and sex still dominate the primitive mammalian side of human existence, but at the present time it looks as if humanity were within sight of their satisfaction. Permanent plenty, no longer a Utopian dream, awaits the arrival of permanent peace. -- John Desmond Bernal
  • It's odd how those who dismiss the peace movement as utopian, don't hesitate to proffer the most absurdly dreamy reasons for going to war: to stamp out terrorism, install democracy, eliminate fascism, and most entertainingly, to "rid the world of evil-doers. -- Arundhati Roy
  • The planet Mars -- crimson and bright, filling our telescopes with vague intimations of almost-familiar landforms -- has long formed a celestial tabula rasa on which we have inscribed our planeto-logical theories, utopian fantasies, and fears of alien invasion or ecological ruin. -- David Grinspoon
  • In the modern world, in which thousands of people are dying every hour as a consequence of politics, no writing anywhere can begin to be credible unless it is informed by political awareness and principles. Writers who have neither product utopian trash. -- John Berger
  • Wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life. Knowing this gives me hope that human wholeness - mine, yours, ours - need not be a utopian dream, if we can use devastation as a seedbed for new life -- Parker J. Palmer
  • ....This world needs Utopias as it needs fairy stories. It does not matter so much where we are going, as long as we are making consciously for some definite goal. And a Utopia, however strange or fanciful, is the only possible beacon upon the uncharted seas of the distant future. -- Hendrik Willem van Loon
  • The trebling of the population in this small and impoverished country, flowing with milk and honey but not with sufficient water, rich in rocks and sand dunes but poor in natural resources and vital raw materials, has been no easy task: Indeed, practical men, with their eyes fixed upon things as they are, regarded it as an empty and insubstantial utopian dream. -- David Ben-Gurion
  • Utopian movements produce dystopias. -- Dennis Prager
  • Political thought in France is either nostalgic or Utopian. -- Raymond Aron
  • I'm not an activist by nature. I am suspicious of Utopian thinking and equally suspicious of its alternate. -- Margaret Atwood
  • It's not Utopian to believe that we can create a global registry of financial assets so we know who owns what in different countries. -- Thomas Piketty
  • It would be unjust, and moreover Utopian, for Shakespeare to direct the shoemakers' union. But it would be equally disastrous forthe shoemakers' union to ignore Shakespeare. -- Albert Camus
  • There cannot be a nation of millionaires, and there never has been a nation of Utopian comrades; but there have been any number of nations of tolerably contented peasants. -- Gilbert K. Chesterton
  • I know it's way too Utopian to think we will all ever just hugand love each other- but proactively dealing with hate could be as important to the future as clean water. -- Bobby Sager
  • It's illegitimate to talk about a post-scarcity Utopia without talking about questions of distribution. There have always been these Utopian predictions - 'electricity too cheap to meter' was the atomic promise of the 1950s. -- Mitch Kapor
  • The military mind tends to be conservative, realistic and historical. The civilian mind tends to be liberal, idealistic and Utopian. Journalists, obviously, are civilians, and they tend to distrust, and to suspect, the military's motives. -- Mark Riebling
  • Utopian speculations ... must come back into fashion. They are a way of affirming faith in the possibility of solving problems that seem at the moment insoluble. Today even the survival of humanity is a utopian hope. -- Norman O. Brown
  • All ideas advanced to deal with the Florentine noise problem, the Florentine traffic problem, are Utopian, and nobody believes in them, just as nobody believed in Machiavelli's Prince, a Utopian image of the ideally self-interested despot. -- Mary McCarthy
  • Force when aggressively applied is "violence" and is, therefore, morally unjustifiable, but when it is used in the furtherance of a legitimate cause, it has its moral justification. The elimination of force at all costs in Utopian.. -- Bhagat Singh
  • All serious art, music, literature is a critical act. It is so, firstly, in the sense of Matthew Arnold's phrase: "a criticism of life." Be it realistic, fantastic, Utopian or satiric, the construct of the artist is a counter-statement to the world. -- George Steiner
  • These Utopian idealists like the Clintons who think they really do have the answers. They think they're following the best minds of their generation, but they're not the best minds. They don't realize that they may be the worst minds of their generation. -- Michael Savage
  • At its best New Wave/punk represents a fundamental and age-old Utopian dream: that if you give people the license to be as outrageous as they want in absolutely any fashion they can dream up, they'll be creative about it, and do something good besides. -- Lester Bangs
  • A panel at a beautiful annual literary festival in Brazil, held in the almost Utopian coastal town of Parati, found me matched with Fernando Gabeira. This comparison reduced my own limited charisma value to something like zero: Gabeira has excelled at every cultural activity in Brazil. -- Christopher Hitchens
  • Utopia is a meta-utopia: the environment in which Utopian experiments may be tried out; the environment in which people are free to do their own thing; the environment which must, to a great extent, be realized first if more particular Utopian visions are to be realized stably. -- Robert Nozick
  • Home is pretty utopian. -- Scott Adams
  • Nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation are not utopian ideals. They are critical to global peace and security. -- Ban Ki-moon
  • I think of an intellectual as just being bookish, being interested in history books, utopian ideas, that kind of thing. -- Richard Rorty
  • In my bright, utopian future world, they will hand out college educations like cups of water at the end of the L.A. Marathon. -- Henry Rollins
  • Perhaps I seek certain utopian things, space for human honour and respect, landscapes not yet offended, planets that do not exist yet, dreamed landscapes. -- Werner Herzog
  • Propaganda requires a permanent network of communication so that it can systematically stifle reflection with emotive or utopian slogans. Its pace is usually fast. -- John Berger
  • There is something very utopian about what I do. But utopia is nothing more than a truth that the world is not yet ready to hear. -- Yann Arthus-Bertrand
  • I know it's very idealistic and utopian, but I believe we need to just let everyone not be judged in terms of religion, groups or nations or region. -- Shah Rukh Khan
  • Contrary to the utopian rhetoric of social media enthusiasts, the Internet often makes the jump from deliberation to participation even more difficult, thwarting collective action under the heavy pressure of never-ending internal debate. -- Evgeny Morozov
  • When Oscar Niemeyer died on December 5, 2012, ten days before his 105th birthday, he was universally regarded as the very last of the twentieth century's major architectural masters, an astonishing survivor whose most famous accomplishment, Brasilia, was the climactic episode of utopian High Modern urbanism. -- Martin Filler
  • The designs of the paper euros, introduced in 2002, proclaim a utopian aspiration. Gone are the colorful bills of particular nations, featuring pictures of national heroes of statecraft, culture and the arts, pictures celebrating unique national narratives. With the euro, 16 nations have said goodbye to all that. -- George Will
  • Money has always been a particular problem for revolutionaries and anti-capitalists. What will money look like 'after the revolution'? How will it function? Will it exist at all? It's hard to answer the question if you don't know what money actually is. Proposing to eliminate it entirely seems utopian and naive. -- David Graeber
  • The biggest threat to a better life is the desire to keep the future under control - to make the world predictable by reining in creativity and enterprise. Progress as a neat blueprint, with no deviations and no surprise, may work in children's cartoons or utopian novels. But it's just a fantasy. -- Virginia Postrel
  • True Americanism is practical idealism. Its aims, instead of being materialistic and mechanical, are idealistic to the point of being Utopian. In this way, the U.S. can provide and express ideals that strike a chord in humans everywhere - a declaration of independence on behalf of all the peoples of the world. -- Maurice Saatchi
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  • My husband is not American. He was born in Brazil, where he grew up under a filthy, corrupt dictatorship. In his twenties, he moved to Europe, where he lived for a while under various socialist democracies. He spent a few years on a kibbutz in Israel, living out a utopian experiment in communal existence. -- Elizabeth Gilbert
  • When I wrote 'The Giver,' it contained no so-called 'bad words.' It was set, after all, in a mythical, futuristic, and Utopian society. Not only was there no poverty, divorce, racism, sexism, pollution, or violence in the world of 'The Giver'; there was also careful attention paid to language: to its fluency, precision, and power. -- Lois Lowry
  • Do not hide behind utopian logic which says that until we have the perfect security environment, nuclear disarmament cannot proceed. This is old-think. This is the mentality of the Cold War era. We must face the realities of the 21st century. The Conference on Disarmament can be a driving force for building a safer world and a better future. -- Ban Ki-moon
  • I don't know of any other form of life that gathers up all the food it needs in the first two-thirds of its life in order to do nothing in its last third of life. In a utopian presentist society, instead of working extra hard to put money in the bank, you'd be working to provide value for the people around you. -- Douglas Rushkoff
  • If you're utopian, you're never satisfied. -- Alan Kay
  • The false prophets of Communism predict a utopian society. -- Ezra Taft Benson
  • If utopian fiction became the new trend, I wouldn't read it. -- Veronica Roth
  • The dreams get anchored in aged wisdom not some utopian fantasy. -- Shane Claiborne
  • Looking back, nothing seems so simple than a utopian vision realised. -- Wernher von Braun
  • Only utopian liberals could be surprised that the Nazis were art connoisseurs. -- Camille Paglia
  • The desire to achieve grand utopian plans often poses a grave threat to freedom -- Margaret Thatcher
  • The whole notion that you can equalize opportunity in things that matter is utopian. -- Thomas Sowell
  • Mentor Me: ...the crossroads and convergence of where science, metaphysics, religion, and utopian society intersect. -- Ken Poirot
  • ...reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays.... -- Aldous Huxley
  • In my imaginary utopian world there would be a greater allegiance between music writers and musicians. -- Emily Haines
  • Reality, no matter how utopian, seems to be something people need to frequently take a holiday from. -- Aldous Huxley
  • Almost without exception, everything society has considered a social advance has been prefigured first in some utopian writing. -- David Cooperrider
  • Its a heartening fact about the human race that utopian fiction precedes dystopian fiction in the evolution of literature. -- Paul Di Filippo
  • It's a heartening fact about the human race that utopian fiction precedes dystopian fiction in the evolution of literature. -- Paul Di Filippo
  • There's no such thing as designing the perfect utopian city. Everything is subject to change. There are no final frontiers. -- Jacque Fresco
  • I'm not trying to be a solution or create a freer, utopian world. I think my music dreams of it, though. -- Jenny Hval
  • I think if I were living in a utopian world, then it wouldn't be political commentary; it would be about daffodils. -- Emily Haines
  • Most of the utopian community ideas actually are religious. They're based more on the idea of the monastery than the commune. -- Christopher Hitchens
  • I'm interested in utopian communities of the past. Many of them didn't survive and I'm examining closely the reasons they failed. -- Marina Abramovic
  • The avowed aim of all utopian movements is to put an end to history and to establish a final and permanent calm. -- Ludwig von Mises
  • Jews do not have to be Christians. Christianity is an offshoot of Judaism, but too utopian, too hopeful, too unrealistic a turn. -- Michael Novak
  • There's no way to design a society that's optimal or utopian. It's better than the one that was. Systems always undergo change. -- Jacque Fresco
  • I can't think of anyone who is up on evolutionary psychology and related areas who is deluded enough to be called a utopian. -- Keith Henson
  • It's without doubt my main subject. The way masculinity can go wrong. And I'm something of a gynocrat in a utopian kind of way. -- Martin Amis
  • Either we abandon the utopian globalism of open borders and 'ally-ally-in-free' immigration or we lose the war on terrorism and our freedoms with it. -- Pat Buchanan
  • When you have a vision of where you need to go, it sounds utopian. But when you get to the tipping point, your understanding switches. -- Christiana Figueres
  • All in all, I don't think robots and greater automation can bring about a utopian world as I imagined it would as a kid 50 years ago. -- Stanley Druckenmiller
  • Around 1967 I began backing away from dogmatic Leninism, not so much because I thought it was false, I just decided there was nothing utopian about it. -- Henry Flynt
  • I still believe in what I believed in for 20 years as a Socialist in Parliament, and being a Socialist is not the same as being a utopian. -- Salvador Allende
  • Lagos was the ultimate dysfunctional city - but actually, in terms of all the initiatives and ingenuity, it mobilised an incredibly beautiful, almost utopian landscape of independence and agency. -- Rem Koolhaas
  • The idea that Bentham and Mill were maximizers is the greatest stretch of all. They were progressivists, committed to improving the societies in which they lived, not utopian maximizers. -- Dale Jamieson
  • We have all been injured, profoundly. We require regeneration, not rebirth, and the possibilities for our reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender. -- Donna J. Haraway
  • Citizens have the natural right and the common sense duty to protect themselves, their families, their communities, and their property...guns are the equalizing tools of self-protection, utopian lamentations notwithstanding -- Edgar A. Suter
  • I somehow hope - naïve though I may be, utopian, possibly - that my music has some kind of calming effect on the universe, that it's somehow beneficial to people. -- John Lydon
  • In this branch of utopian real estate, architecture is no longer the art of designing buildings so much as the brutal skyward extrusion of whatever site the developer has managed to assemble. -- Rem Koolhaas
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  • Paradise A concept embraced by almost every culture. A land of peace and harmony. Some say it doesn't belong to the earth, that there is no Shangri-la, no utopian wilderness for the living. -- Ellen Hopkins
  • A utopian future for the Internet could be secured if the heavy-duty influencers - and the grassroots influencers tweeting along - can create a new global organization peopled with defenders of Internet freedom. -- Naomi Wolf
  • Children and old people and the parents in between should be able to live together, in order to learn how to die with grace, together. And I fear that this is purely utopian fantasy ... -- M. F. K. Fisher
  • Here's the thing about politics: It's not an expression of your moral purity and your ethics and your probity and your fond dreams of some utopian future. Progressive people constantly fail to get this. -- Tony Kushner
  • You don't want to move toward some utopian literary situation where everybody's free of all conventions. That's ridiculous! Conventions are what you need. You have nothing to break down if you don't have conventions. -- Lev Grossman
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