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.
Global warming has melted the polar ice caps, raised the levels of the oceans and flooded the earth's great cities. Despite its evident prosperity, New Jersey is scarcely Utopia.
I would say my theme has always been paradise lost, always the lost cause, the lost leader, the lost utopia.
'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.
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.
You can use your idealism to further your aims, if you realize that nothing is Nirvana, nothing is perfect.
The house a woman creates is a Utopia. She can't help it - can't help trying to interest her nearest and dearest not in happiness itself but in the search for it.
Those who made and endorsed our Constitution knew man's nature, and it is to their ideas, rather than to the temptations of utopia, that we must ask that our judges adhere.
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.
All my writing is about the recognition that there is no single reality. But the beauty of it is that you nevertheless go on, walking towards utopia, which may not exist, on a bridge which might end before you reach the other side.
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.
Utopia would seem to offer the spectacle of one of those rare phenomena whose concept is indistinguishable from its reality, whose ontology coincides with its representation.
How would I myself live in this proposed society? How long would it be before I went stark staring mad?
Misery motivates, not utopia.
The future is a choice between Utopia and oblivion.
Abandon all hopes of utopia - there are people involved.
Widely spaced earth-sheltered towns offer sweeping views over the plains. High-speed trains link the communities. Food is grown in the region. Bikeways are everywhere. Nonpolluting hydrogen powers all vehicles. Sunlight and wind generate the hydrogen. Note the earth-covered bridges, the continuous window bands, the wind machines across the farmlands. In this new America, everything is reused, recycled, conserved.
Utopias are often just premature truths.
An island Utopia in a modern, busy, everyday world. A land where there are neither rich nor poor. A heaven on earth - without a fence around it.
The conservative "thinks of political policies as intended to preserve order, justice, and freedom. The ideologue, on the contrary, thinks of politics as a revolutionary instrument for transforming society and even transforming human nature. In his march toward Utopia, the ideologue is merciless.
In Utopia, where every man has a right to everything, they all know that if care is taken to keep the public stores full, no private man can want anything; for among them there is no unequal distribution, so that no man is poor, none in necessity; and though no man has anything, yet they are all rich; for what can make a man so rich as to lead a serene and cheerful life, free from anxieties.
A utopia cannot, by definition, include boredom, but the 'utopia' we are living in is boring.
Some who are too scrupulous to steal your possessions nevertheless see no wrong in tampering with your thoughts.
What we should grasp, however, from the lessons of European history is that, first, there is nothing necessarily benevolent about programmes of European integration; second, the desire to achieve grand utopian plans often poses a grave threat to freedom; and third, European unity has been tried before, and the outcome was far from happy.
(A unified) 'Europe' is the result of plans. It is, in fact, a classic utopian project, a monument to the vanity of intellectuals, a programme whose inevitable destiny is failure: only the scale of the final damage done is in doubt.
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