Utopian Quotes - Page 4

• Think of it. We are blessed with technology that would be indescribable to our forefathers. We have the wherewithal, the know-it-all to feed everybody, clothe everybody, and give every human on Earth a chance. We know now what we could never have known before - that we now have the option for all humanity to make it successfully on this planet in this lifetime. Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment.

  R. Buckminster Fuller

  Blessed, Thinking, Technology

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• There is this thing called the university, and everybody goes there now. And there are these things called teachers who make students read this book with good ideas or that book with good ideas until that's where we get our ideas. We don't think them; we read them in books. I like Utopian talk, speculation about what our planet should be, anger about what our planet is. I think writers are the most important members of society, not just potentially but actually. Good writers must have and stand by their own ideas.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Teacher, Book, Writing

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• Of course, some will say the goal [of abolition] is a utopian dream of human perfection. We needn't worry. There will be more than enough sins left for everyone to commit after we have taken nuclear bombs away from ourselves.

  Jonathan Schell

  Dream, Taken, Goal

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• Did universal charity prevail, earth would be a heaven, and hell a fable.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Inspiring, Kindness, Inspiration

  Charles Caleb Colton (1824). “Lacon, Or, Many Things in a Few Words: Addressed to Those who Think”, p.90

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• To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.

  Michael Joseph Oakeshott

  Laughter, Perfect, Facts

  "On Being Conservative". Essay by Michael Joseph Oakeshott, 1956.

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• 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

  Goodbye, Art, Hero

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• President Obama is a utopian at heart. He wants to improve the lives of the downtrodden, which is a good thing. But, he doesn't understand that damaging the free marketplace in pursuit of 'social justice' will eventually harm those whom he wants to help. The nation's crushing debt is a tsunami brewing off shore.

  Bill O'Reilly

  Crush, Heart, Justice

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• But you have to understand, mental illness is like cholesterol. There is is good kind and the bad. Without the good kind- less flavor to life. Van Gogh, Beethoven, Edgar Allen Poe, Sylvia Plath, Pink Floyd (the early Piper at the Gates of Dawn line up), scientific breakthroughs, spiritual revolution, utopian visions, zany nationalism that kills millions- wait, that’s the bad kind. Tim Dorsey (Hurricane Punch)

  Tim Dorsey

  Spiritual, Waiting, Vision

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• Universal design systems can no longer be dismissed as the irrelevant musings of a small, localized design community. A second modernism has emerged, reinvigorating the utopian search for universal forms that marked the birth of design as a discourse and a discipline nearly a century earlier.

  Ellen Lupton

  Discipline, Design, Community

  Ellen Lupton (2014). “Thinking with Type”, p.174, Chronicle Books

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• Utopia was here at last: its novelty had not yet been assailed by the supreme enemy of a ll Utopias - boredom.

  Arthur C. Clarke

  Boredom, Enemy, Lasts

  Arthur C. Clarke (2012). “Childhood’s End”, p.80, RosettaBooks

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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

  Husband, Israel, Years

  "Leadership Begins With Character". www.huffingtonpost.com. September 21, 2012.

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• Without the Utopians of other times, men would still live in caves, miserable and naked. It was Utopians who traced the lines of the first City.....Out of generous dreams come beneficial realities. Utopia is the principle of all progress, and the essay into a better future.

  Anatole France

  Inspirational, Motivational, Dream

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• On the conservative side, today's libertarianism is far more dogmatic and devoid of qualification than the liberalism of Adam Smith or J.S. Mill. Like Marxism, libertarianism is a utopian worldview based on an economic-determinist vision of history. Unlike Marxism, libertarianism is highly specific in its predictions about the transition to the utopian world order, rendering it vulnerable to fact.

  Michael Lind

  Order, Vision, Transition

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• 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

  Past, Community, Reason

  "Marina Abramović, Immaterial Girl". Interview with Gerry Visco, www.interviewmagazine.com. May 29, 2013.

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• Jews do not have to be Christians. Christianity is an offshoot of Judaism, but too utopian, too hopeful, too unrealistic a turn.

  Michael Novak

  Christian, Hopeful, Judaism

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• 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

  Accomplishment, Survivor, Oscars

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• 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

  Order, Two, People

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• And the annual meetings of the League's Assembly are in effect official peace congresses binding on the participating states to an extent that most statesmen a quarter of a century ago would have regarded as utopian.

  Hjalmar Branting

  League, Assembly, Century

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• It is no longer enough to point out what we don't like, we have to work out 'What sort of society do we want?

  Sheila Rowbotham

  Work Out, Want, Enough

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• 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

  Dream, World, Rebirth

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• 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

  Dream, Fashion, People

  New Musical Express (December 1977), as quoted in "Various Artists: No Thanks!: The 70s Punk Rebellion" by Eric Carr, pitchfork.com. February 10, 2004.

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• I try to look at the evolution of these utopian claims. In the late '60s there was an assumption that the wealth generated by industry would be taxed and then put into social programs and it would provide a baseline of stability that would allow people to have the time for self-expression; and that social contract has eroded over the last four decades and now it's every person for themselves.

  Astra Taylor

  Expression, Self, People

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Look back on the utopian dreams of the previous century, or even the century before that, where people thought machines would ultimately give us a quality of life where our needs would be taken care of so we could all basically be artists together in the evening, after we had fished, hunted, raised cattle - or whatever it was Marx imagined for us.

  Astra Taylor

  Dream, Taken, Artist

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I was really interested in 20th century communalism and alternative communities, the boom of communes in the 60s and 70s. That led me back to the 19th century. I was shocked to find what I would describe as far more utopian ideas in the 19th century than in the 20th century. Not only were the ideas so extreme, but surprising people were adopting them.

  Christine Jennings

  Ideas, People, Community

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The Oneida Perfectionists, along with some of the others, believed that feminism, and abolitionism, and other causes that they pursued in their own way without participating with other people outside of their communities, were all piecemeal reforms. That's what makes a utopian a utopian, this idea that they were going to create a whole new world from scratch.

  Christine Jennings

  Ideas, People, Community

  Source: therumpus.net

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