Quotes About Utopianism

#1. Utopianism is probably a necessary social device for generating the superhuman efforts without which no major revolution is achieved.

Eric Hobsbawm

#2. (As Plato There is nothing superstitious about forcing bad consequences for the hubris of paternalistic utopianism. Humanity should never be frozen into a vision of the best. A creative society must be willing to tolerate some degree of instability because creativity is inherently unstable.

Rebecca Goldstein

#3. Anti-utopianism continues to suffuse our culture ... Today few imagine that society can be fundamentally improved, and those who do are seen as at best deluded, at worst threatening.

Lewis H. Lapham

#4. Violence, of course, is generally associated with frankly totalitarian forms of anti-political utopianism like Communism, but the Second World War shows that liberal universalists are as capable of violence as Communists. They are just less capable of honesty.

Greg Johnson

#5. As the science of economics ... exploded the fallacies of every brand of utopianism, it was outlawed and stigmatized as unscientific.

Ludwig Von Mises

#6. The idea that the Internet favors the oppressed rather than the oppressor is marred by what I call cyber-utopianism: a naive belief in the emancipatory nature of online communication that rests on a stubborn refusal to admit its downside.

Evgeny Morozov

#7. Conservatism is pessimistic, with a negative tendency - which we mostly resist - towards despair. Liberals are optimists, with a negative tendency, rarely resisted, towards utopianism.

John Derbyshire

#8. This was an age of utopianism. Political leaders had utopian visions, and so did many citizens, especially the younger generation. The spirit is hard to capture in an age of skepticism, since utopianism, like revolution, is so unreasonable.

Sheila Fitzpatrick

#9. 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

#10. Utopianism substitutes glorious predictions and unachievable promises for knowledge, science, and reason, while laying claim to them all.

Mark R. Levin

#11. This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free. Once more a humanistic utopianism ends in tyranny, whether in Rousseau's writing or in the Reign of Terror which carried his position to its conclusion. Robespierre,

Francis A. Schaeffer

#12. There's no such thing as "an auteurist filmmaker." Every film directors is an auteur. We only make films that we do because we cannot put on clothes that don't fit us.

Lee Yoon-ki

#13. When death tells a story yo really have to listen

Markus Zusak

#14. It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.

Terry Eagleton

#15. I'd long wanted to write about that moment when a woman steps off the career track to have her first child. For me, that was a scary time.

Hallie Ephron

#16. Should the poor be flattered? No; let the candied tongue lick absurd pomp, and crook the pregnant hinges of the knee where thrift may follow fawning.

William Shakespeare

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

A.E. Samaan

#18. This was excitement, and desire, and pleasure. Nothing mattered while you were with a man. Nothing but the man, or men in this case.
This was freedom. This was forgetting.

Marshall Thornton

#19. You gotta beware of the utopian train of thought, mate. That's usually the first step towards fascism.

Daniel Clausen

#20. Teilhard merely seems to set the problem of man, as the utopian sees it, on lofty heights; yet, hi terminology, which mixes archeology, sociology, biology, astronomy, and a vulgarized theology, can, in fact, be translated at every turn into the language of collectivism and of totalitarian polices.

Thomas Molnar