Quotes About Utopias

#1. We spoke and acted as if, given the opportunity for self-government, we would quickly create utopias. Instead injustice, even tyranny, is rampant.

Julius Nyerere

#2. Even galaxy-spanning anarchist utopias of stupefying full-spectrum civilisational power have turf wars within their unacknowledged militaries.

Iain Banks

#3. Utopias are often just premature truths.

Alphonse De Lamartine

#4. I don't think we should be engaged in nation-building. It's not our job to turn foreign nations into democratic utopias, to try to turn Iraq into Switzerland. It is the military's job to hunt down and kill our enemies, to kill ISIS before they murder American citizens and they wage jihad.

Ted Cruz

#5. There is no way I can avoid thinking about the kind of world I belong to. The abuse of utopias disfigures everything.

Floriano Martins

#6. All the Utopias will come to pass only when we grow wings and all people are converted into angels.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

#7. I believe that all my work explores the human desire or obsession for utopias, and the structure of all my works is the search for utopias lost and rediscovered.

Marguerite Young

#8. Utopias now appear much more realizable than one used to think. We are now faced with a different new worry: How to prevent their realization.

Nikolai Berdyaev

#9. Utopias are boring. Distopias on the other hand, are interesting.

Robert Silverberg

#10. We must steel ourselves against utopias and be content with a slightly better state.

Will Durant

#11. The best novels capture the times in which the writer lives, which accounts for the current, if contrasting taste for lost utopias and dystopian nightmares peopled by vampires and wolves.

Chloe Thurlow

#12. I play the radio and moon about ... and dream of Utopias where its always July the 24th 1935, in the middle of summer forever.

Zelda Fitzgerald

#13. All utopias are dystopias. The term "dystopia" was coined by fools that believed a "utopia" can be functional.

A.E. Samaan

#14. Utopias rest on the fallacy that perfection is a legitimate goal of human existence.

Lewis Mumford

#15. The contradictory nature of the socialist utopias is one explanation of the violence involved in the attempt to impose them: it takes infinite force to make people do what is impossible.

Roger Scruton

#16. Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies.

Will Durant

#17. Happiness is the chief material also in the construction of Utopias.

Wyndham Lewis

#18. Utopia was here at last: its novelty had not yet been assailed by the supreme enemy of all Utopias - boredom.

Arthur C. Clarke

#19. All "favourable" Utopias seem to be alike in postulating perfection while being unable to suggest happiness.

George Orwell

#20. No one worried except a few philosophers. The race was too intent upon savoring its new-found freedom to look beyond the pleasures of the present. Utopia was here at last: its novelty had not yet been assailed by the supreme enemy of all Utopias - boredom. Perhaps

Arthur C. Clarke

#21. All the Utopias - Brook Farm, Robert Owen's sanctuary of chatter, Upton Sinclair's Helicon Hall - and their regulation end in scandal, feuds, poverty, griminess, disillusion.

Sinclair Lewis

#22. For him, the writer should be the very devil, a disturber of dreams and wrecker of fatuous utopias, the bringer-in of reality, and rival of God in his wish to make worlds.

Hanif Kureishi

#23. 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

#24. Utopias of equality are biologically doomed, and the best that the amiable philosopher can hope for is an approximate equality of legal justice and educational opportunity. A

Will Durant

#25. And the weakness of all Utopias is this, that they take the greatest difficulty of man and assume it to be overcome, and then give an elaborate account of the overcoming of the smaller ones.

G.K. Chesterton

#26. All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in.
[Conversation with Elizabeth Farnsworth, PBS NewsHour, March 9, 1998]

Toni Morrison

#27. What was the matter that pureness of feeling couldn't be kept up? I see I met those writers in the big book of utopias at a peculiar time. In those utopias, set up by hopes and art, how could you overlook the part of nature or be sure you could keep the feelings up?

Saul Bellow

#28. It's not the job of the U.S. military to do nation-building or produce democratic utopias.

Ted Cruz

#29. A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.

Oscar Wilde

#30. The glory of the world is transitory, and we should not measure our lives by it, but by the choice we make to follow our personal legend, to believe in our utopias and to fight for our dreams.

Paulo Coelho

#31. But utopias don't exist, of course, anywhere in any world. Like alchemy or perpetual motion.

Haruki Murakami

#32. Why have we had to invent Eden, to live submerged in the nostalgia of a lost paradise, to make up utopias, propose a future for ourselves?

Julio Cortazar

#33. We must mistrust utopias: they usually end in holocausts.

Mario Vargas-Llosa

#34. Utopias bore me. I'm interested in constructing messy, complicated societies that are full of flaws and then saying, ooh, this is interesting, let's see what happens if I poke it here. And concurrently with this and the previous point, I'm interested in making up cultures that are different

Marie Brennan

#35. Utopias have their value
nothing so wonderfully expands the imaginative horizons of human potentialities
but as guides to conduct they can prove literally fatal.

Isaiah Berlin

#36. The Fundamental Principle that governs - or ought to govern -human affairs if we wish to avoid misunderstandings, conflicts, or pointless utopias, is negotiation.

Umberto Eco

#37. Political utopias are a form of nostalgia for an imagined past projected onto the future as a wish.

Michael Ignatieff

#38. The future is here, now, and the past is full of actual deeds, real history. Utopias hardly have the meat on their bones to sustain a people in grave times.

Patricia Hampl

#39. Capitalists desire purchasing power. Socialists lust for the power to plan society. Which is worse?

A.E. Samaan

#40. Katrina was an extreme version of what goes on in many disasters,wherein how you behave depends on whether you think your neighbors or fellow citizens are a greater threat than the havoc wrought by a disaster or a greater good than the property in houses and stores around you.

Rebecca Solnit

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

Daniel Clausen