Best 131 quotes in «utopia quotes» category

No dreaming may stand still, for this bodes no good. But if it becomes a dreaming ahead, then its cause appears quite differently and excitingly alive. The dim and weakening features, which may be characteristic of mere yearning, disappears; and then yearning can show what it really is able to accomplish.

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.

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.

Oh my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger. Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions. There is one who remembers the way to your door: Life you may evade, but Death you shall not. You shall not deny the Stranger. They constantly try to escape From the darkness outside and within By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good. But the man that is shall shadow The man that pretends to be.

Now, this was a combination that she wouldn’t dare to dream of, even in her worst nightmare.

Num mundo perfeito isento de erros e horrores não escrevo crítica social nem manifesto político, eu escrevo apenas beleza.

People needed proof that Utopia was nothing more than a theory, an illusion read in fictional stories.

People, imperfect and corruptible are society's building blocks. Political theories evading this reality are a catastrophe in waiting.

Peace ought not be regarded the height of civilization, else like barbarians we forever battle for peace.

Rakyat yang nasionalis hendaknya belajar menghemat energi. Pemimpin dan pemerintahan yang nasionalis hendaknya memikirkan cara-cara penghematan, bukan mengeksploitas sisa sumber daya alam yang kita miliki. Kembangkan sistem transportasi massal yang memadai, sehingga jumlah kendaraan di jalan raya berkurang. Dengan sendirinya pemakaian bahan bakar akan berkurang. Hentikan pembangunan menara-menara perkantoran dan apartemen-apartemen tinggi di perkotaan. Biarlah penghijauan di kota-kota besar tetap terpelihara. Pembangunan di daerah-daerah terpencil lebih diperhatikan. Biarlah orang di desa mendapatkan pekerjaan di desanya sendiri. Sehingga mereka tidak perlu menambah beban metropolis. Pembangunan harus merata, harus horizontal, tidak vertikal.

Perhaps every society is a utopia when you fail to peel up all the layers and look at what's underneath

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

Reality is what people who lack vision see.

She said all a body would have to do there [Heaven] was to go around all day long with a harp and sing, forever and ever.

She shook her head. "It sounds suspiciously like Nirvana." "What's wrong with that?" "Pure Spirit, one hundred percent proof—that's a drink that only the most hardened contemplation guzzlers indulge in. Bodhisattvas dilute their Nirvana with equal parts of love and work." "This is better," Will insisted. "You mean, it's more delicious. That's why it's such an enormous temptation. The only temptation that God could succumb to. The fruit of the ignorance of good and evil. What heavenly lusciousness, what a supermango! God had been stuffing Himself with it for billions of years. Then all of a sudden, up comes Homo sapiens, out pops the knowledge of good and evil. God had to switch to a much less palatable brand of fruit. You've just eaten a slice of the original supermango, so you can sympathize with Him." A chair creaked, there was a rustle of skirts, then a series of small busy sounds that he was unable to interpret. What was she doing? He could have answered that question by simply opening his eyes. But who cared, after all, what she might be doing? Nothing was of any importance except this blazing uprush of bliss and understanding. "Supermango to fruit of knowledge — I'm going to wean you," she said, "by easy stages.

She was afraid of not being able to pull herself out of the dream world, never waking up, never knowing what really happened, never realizing her goals, her hopes, her dreams.

(...)si nos convencemos de que la humanidad puede trascender colmillos y garras, si nos convencemos de que las diversas razas y credos pueden compartir pacíficamente la tierra, (...)si nos convencemos de que los gobernantes deben ser justos, de que la violencia debe dominarse, de que el poder ha de ser responsable y las riquezas de la tierra y los océanos deben repartirse equitativamente entre todos, este mundo se hará realidad. No me engaño. Ya sé que es el más difícil de los mundos posibles.

Some countries believe that, once they have rid themselves of a monarchy and become a republic, they have morphed into a kind of Utopia. When, in fact, they have merely created another set of compromises for themselves.

Sometimes it's possible, just barely possible, to imagine a version of this world different from the existing one, a world in which there is true justice, heroic honesty, a clear perception possessed by each individual about how to treat all the others. Sometimes I swear I could see it, glittering in the pavement, glowing between the words in a stranger's sentence, a green, impossible vision--the world as it was meant to be, like a mist around the world as it is.

Syldor was not a land of oppressive rules, roles, and labels. Here, love and power were open to, for, and between all; woman or man, rich or poor. What mattered was the sharpness of your mind, the speed of your blade, and the heat of your touch.

The central planners of Democratic Socialism tighten their noose when people resist their plans and assert their rights. All Socialism is intended to devolve into Communism, and as a result, Totalitarianism.

The foundation of morality on the human sentiments of what is acceptable behavior versus repulsive behavior has always made morals susceptible to change. Much of what was repulsive 100 years ago is normal today, and - although it may be a slippery slope - what is repulsive today is possible to be normal 100 years into tomorrow; the human standard has always been but to push the envelope. In this way, all generations are linked, and one can only hope that every extremist, self-proclaimed progressive is considering this ultimate 'Utopia' to which his kindness will lead at the end of the chain.

The great hatred of capitalism in the hearts of the oppressed, ancient and modern, I think, stems not merely from the ensuing vast inequality in wealth, and the often unfair and arbitrary nature of who profits and who suffers, but from the silent acknowledgement that under a free market economy the many victims of the greed of the few are still better off than those under the utopian socialism of the well-intended. It is a hard thing for the poor to acknowledge benefits from their rich moral inferiors who never so intended it. (p.272)

The ills attributed to an anthropomorphic abstraction called "society" may be laid more realistically at the door of Everyman. Utopia must spring in the private bosom before it can flower into civic virtue, inner reforms leading to outer ones. A man who has reformed himself will reform thousands.

The promise to save or create a ‘perfect’ humanity is almost always only and excuse for the urge to rule it.

The reason why camps proved economically profitable had been foreseen as far back as Thomas More, the great-grandfather of socialism, in his Utopia. The labor of the zeks was needed for degrading and particularly heavy work, which no one, under socialism, would wish to perform. For work in remote and primitive localities where it would not be possible to construct housing, schools, hospitals, and stores for many years to come. For work with pick and spade—in the flowering of the twentieth century. For the erection of the great construction projects of socialism, when the economic means for them did not yet exist.

Personally I know only one person who wrote about utopia. Afterwards he was executed. I suppose it's not my genre.

She was fantastically beautiful, so even though her words sounded like fragile utopian glass that would shatter horrendously on Earth in about five minutes, it sounded nice when she said it.

Some thoughts on heaven? I have this theory that heaven is different for everyone. It has to be, or it wouldn’t be heaven. My grandmother’s heaven? In her heaven she doesn’t have to share the remote with anyone, and it is Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune on all the time, with nary a rerun ever, and the old lady always wins the big money and a trip to Europe to tour a castle or somewhere warm but not too hot with nice churches. In her heaven your knees don’t hurt and your back doesn’t hurt and you get to be whatever age was your favourite age to be and you still have all your teeth and there are bingo games right after dinner and raspberry hard candies and no one ever has to do the dishes. In my gran’s heaven, you can still have yourself a proper smoke in the living room and it doesn’t ruin the new paint job and the lawn never gets too long and the foxes don’t chase the birds off the birdfeeder. In her heaven, a nice bit of cheese won’t give you the bad stomach and real men don’t beat their wives or fuck their children, and every day is payday, and the Friday of a long weekend. Floors wax themselves, but you still get to hang the laundry, but only if you feel like it.

The denial of age in America culminates in the prolongevity movement, which hopes to abolish old age altogether. But the dread of age originates not in the "cult of youth" but in a cult of the self. Not only in its narcissistic indifference to future generations but in its grandiose vision of a technological utopia without old age, the prolongevity movement exemplifies the fantasy of "absolute, sadistic power" which, according to Kohut, so deeply colors the narcissistic outlook. Pathological in its psychological origins and inspiration, superstitious in its faith in medical deliverance, the prolongevity movement expresses in characteristic form the anxieties of a culture that believes it has no future.

The desire to engineer humanity is a sign of a mind warped by megalomania and lust for power.

The Earth is nothing but phlegm spat out by the Sun, and our immediate solar system a whirlwind of boulders. There is no "delicate balance".

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

the human mind was no better than in its earliest period of savagery, only better informed

There are probably no white journalists in America who would say they chose their houses because they were in white neighborhoods, but that, in effect, is what they do. Peter Brown of the Orlando Sentinel looked up the zip codes of 3,400 journalists, and found that they cluster in upscale neighborhoods, far from inner cities. More than one-third of Washington Post reporters live in just four fancy D.C. suburbs. Television personality Chris Matthews routinely promotes integration, and Ted Koppel hectored whites who live apart from blacks. Where do they live? Mr. Matthews in 95-percent white Chevy Case, and Mr. Koppel in Potomac, also in Maryland, which had a black population of 3.9 percent. Perhaps these men thought they lived inside their television sets. Sociologist Charles Gallagher of La Salle University has noted that television advertising is a 'carefully manufactured racial utopia [...] that is far afield of reality,' where everyone has black and Hispanic neighbors with whom they discuss which brand of toothpaste is best. Jerome D. Williams, a professor of advertising and African American studies at the University of Texas at Austin also laughs at advertisers' depictions of American life, adding that 'if you look at the United States in terms of where we live and who our friends are and where we go to church, we live in different worlds.

There are those who feel that the world is ultimately moving closer to Truth and to prosperity as the times evolve; then there are those who feel that it is ultimately moving farther away from Truth and into self-destruction. From this, and if it were really that simplistic, one might get the impression that life gravitates slightly into two types of people whom which are diametrically opposed in spirit.

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

There is a tyranny in the womb of every Utopia.

The ticket to Utopia ia real Love that springs from within us.

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything....The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place.

The worst kind of victim was the kind that was aware of nothing.

They constantly try to escape From the darkness outside and within By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good. But the man that is will shadow The man that pretends to be.

The utopian candy shell melted away to a hard center of bizarre reality.

This lively health, when entirely free from all mixture of pain, of itself gives an inward pleasure, independent of all external objects of delight; and though this pleasure does not so powerfully affect us, nor act so strongly on the senses as some of the others, yet it may be esteemed as the greatest of all pleasures, and almost all the Utopians reckon it the foundation and basis of all the other joys of life; since this alone makes the state of life easy and desirable; and when this is wanting, a man is really capable of no other pleasure.

To write a letter is to send a message to the future; to speak of the present with an addressee who is not there, knowing nothing about how that person is (in what spirits, with whom) while we write and, above all, later: while reading over what we have written. Correspondence is the utopian form of conversation because it annihilates the present and turns the future into the only possible place for dialogue.

Thomas More's Utopia was not a recommendation. It was a warning.

Utopia retains throughout its long history the basic form of the narrative of a journey... First comes the picture of a happy people in a beautiful and well-ordered setting; then comes the lecture on how it all came about, how it works, and, by implication, how it might be made to work in the traveller's own society.

Utopia confronts reality not with a measured assessment of the possibilities of change but with the demand for change. 'This is the way the world should be.' It refuses to accept current definitions of the possible because it knows these to be part of the reality that it seeks to change... Wilde was right: 'A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at.

Ví dụ như người Utopia không thể hiểu được tại sao lại có người mê mẩn được vẻ óng ánh buồn thảm của một hòn đá bé xíu trong khi họ có toàn bộ sao sáng trên trời để chiêm ngưỡng - hoặc làm sao lại có người ngu ngốc đến nỗi tưởng mình hơn người khác chỉ vì mặc quần áo dệt bằng sợi len mịn và nhỏ hơn người ta. Nói cho cùng thì len là quần áo của cừu và không thể làm cho ai thành cái gì hơn cừu được.

Well, gentlemen, I have listened to all your Solutions, and I now inform you that I, and I alone, except perhaps for Walt Trowbridge and the ghost of Pareto, have the perfect, the inevitable, the only Solution, and that is: There is no Solution! There will never be a state of society anything like perfect! "There never will be a time when there won't be a large proportion of people who feel poor no matter how much they have, and envy their neighbors who know how to wear cheap clothes showily, and envy their neighbors who can dance or make love or digest better.