Utopian Quotes

“Utopia was here at last: its novelty had not yet been assailed by the supreme enemy of all Utopias—boredom.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End

“In the past the need for a hierarchal form of society has been the doctrine specifically of the High. It had been preached by kings and aristocrats and the priests, lawyers and the like who were parasitical upon them, and it had generally been softened by promises of an imaginary world beyond the grave.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“I marvel at the placidity of the Utopian who imagines that man is perfectible. There is no denying that the human creature is born selfish, abusive, vile. Just look around you and see. Society cynical and ferocious, the humble heckled and pillaged by the rich traffickers in necessities. Everywhere the triumph of the mediocre and unscrupulous, everywhere the apotheosis of crooked politics and finance. And you think you can make any progress against a stream like that? No, man has never changed. His soul was corrupt in the days of Genesis and is not less rotten at present. Only the form of his sins varies. Progress is the hypocrisy which refines the vices.”
― Huysmans Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

“If love is under siege, it is because it threatens the very essence of commercial civilization. Everything is designed to make us forget that love is our most vivid manifestation and the most common power of life that is in us. Shouldn't we wonder how the lights that glimmer in the eye can blow a fuse for a time, even as barriers of oppression break and jam our passions? Yet despite a life stunted and distorted by mediated Spectacle, nothing has ever managed to strip love of its primal force. Although the heart's music fails to overwhelm the cacophony of profit efficiency, bit by bit it composes our destinies, according to tones, chords, and dissonances which render us happy if only we learn to harmonize the scattered notes that string emotions together.”
― Raoul Vaneigem

“You gotta beware of the utopian train of thought, mate. That's usually the first step towards fascism.”
― daniel clausen, The Ghosts of Nagasaki

“Thomas More's Utopia was not a recommendation. It was a warning.”
― A.E. Samaan

“Let us admit that we have attended parties where for one brief night a republic of gratified desires was attained. Shall we not confess that the politics of that night have more reality and force for us than those of, say, the entire U.S. Government? Some of the "parties" we've mentioned lasted for two or three years. Is this something worth imagining, worth fighting for? Let us study invisibility, webworking, psychic nomadism--and who knows what we might attain?”
― Hakim Bey

“The science fiction author, H.G. Wells was an avid supporter of eugenics and a believer in a hierarchy of the races.”
― A.E. Samaan

“After seeing the various fantastic sights, a visitor to Panorama Island would have had to gasp in amazement at this unsurpassable view. He would have had the impression that the entire island was a rose floating on the vast ocean and that the giant scarlet flower of an opium dream was conversing on an equal footing with the sun in the sky, just the two of them. What kind of strange beauty had that incomparable simplicity and grandeur created? Some travelers might have recalled the world of myth that their distant ancestors had seen. . . .

How can the author describe the madness and debauchery, the pleasures of revelry and drunkenness, the numberless games of life and death that were played day and night on that magnificent stage? You readers might find something that resembled it, in part, in your most fantastic, bloodiest, and most beautiful nightmares.”
― Rampo Edogawa, Strange Tale of Panorama Island

“Everything feels utopian at some point or another. The ideas we have accepted today felt utopian in the previous era. If reformers would have given up their 'fight to abolish Sati' as an utopian idea, we would have never gotten rid of the practice. The question is; how far is our generation ready to go against the grain, when we see injustice happening in our day? Are we ready to introspect, why the idea of brotherhood across religious and caste lines feels utopian and radical today?”
― Samir Satam, Litost: Sliced Stories

“People, imperfect and corruptible are society's building blocks. Political theories evading this reality are a catastrophe in waiting.”
― A.E. Samaan

“the path that leads to utopia is not necessarily itself utopian”
― Peter Frase, Four Futures: Life After Capitalism

“Centrally planned economies are upended by out of control population. Their escape valve is eugenics.”
― A.E. Samaan

“Her eyes flashed, hot and angry, like lightening cutting through a red sunset.”
― Tyffani Clark Kemp, Bittersweet

“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".”
― A.E. Samaan, From a "Race of Masters" to a "Master Race": 1948 to 1848

“They were utopian, which meant they saw imperfection everywhere they looked.”
― Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union

“...new discoveries show that American soldiers used the swastika as their symbol early in World War I, and up to 1941, against Germany. The symbol was used by Americans in the French Escadrille Lafayette, by the 45th Infantry Division, and on Boeing P-12 planes. The discoveries are in the growing body of work by the historian Dr. Rex Curry (author of 'Swastika Secrets'). He has previously shown how socialists in the USA originated the modern swastika as overlapping 'S' letters for 'Socialists' joining together in a utopian 'Socialist Society.”
― James B. Lawrence, Cosmic Evolution

“Mentor Me: ...the crossroads and convergence of where science, metaphysics, religion, and utopian society intersect.”
― Ken Poirot, Mentor Me: GA=T+E—A Formula to Fulfill Your Greatest Achievement

“This society of 'creatures that once were men' had one fine characteristic - no one of them endeavored to make out that he was better than the others, nor compelled the others to acknowledge his superiority.”
― Maxim Gorky

“FUCK "UNITY"!!
What a pathetic way of thinking. How arrogant of Progressives to think that my hopes and dreams mirror their hopes and dreams. What an absolute bore.... what an total lack of originality or individuality... I believe in individual liberty. I am an extremist on the topic of individual liberty, precisely because I value original thinking and original accomplishments. Fuck unity of purpose. Fuck collectivism. My life is not your life. I have my own path. Get out of my way.”
― A.E. Samaan

“Psychology at best tells us how things are, not how they are supposed to be! There is no utopic science.”
― zal

“The Modern Era was to be one of plans and proposals, which is to say futurist to the point of bigotry.”
― Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present

“The world has always been ruled by violent people just as a jungle is ruled by a lion. Non-violent people have always had to submit to the onslaught of the violent people and lose their honour.The rule of non-violence i as utopian as the sheep ruling a jungle over lions.”
― Awdhesh Singh, Myths are Real, Reality is a Myth

“And so, it seems to me, it is with our prisons. They are filled with criminals which our virtuous State has made what they are by its iniquitous laws, its grinding monopolies, and the horrible social conditions that result from them. We enact many laws that manufacture criminals, and then a few that punish them. Is it too much to expect that the new social conditions which must follow the abolition of all interference with the production and distribution of wealth will in the end so change the habits and propensities of men that our jails and prisons, our policemen and our soldiers,—in a word, our whole machinery and outfit of defence,—will be superfluous? That, at least, is the Anarchists' belief. It sounds Utopian, but it really rests on severely economic grounds.”
― Frank H Brooks, The Individualist Anarchists: Anthology of Liberty, 1881-1908

“The Anarchist does not want to destroy all existing institutions with a crash and then inaugurate the substituting process on their ruins. He simply asks to be let alone in substituting false systems now, so that they may gradually fall to pieces by their own dead weight. He asks the humble privilege of being allowed to set up a free bank in peaceable competition with the government subsidized class bank on the opposite corner. He asks the privilege of establishing a private post office in fair competition with the governmentally established one. He asks to be let alone in establishing his title to the soil by free occupation, cultivation, and use rather than by a title hampered by vested rights which were designed to keep the masses landless. He asks to be allowed to set up his domestic relations on the basis of free love in peaceable competition with ecclesiastically ordered love, which is a crime against Nature and the destroyer of love, order, and harmony itself. He asks not to be taxed upon what has been robbed from him under a machine in which he has practically no voice and no choice. In short, the Anarchist asks for free land, free money, free trade, free love, and the right to free competition with the existing order at his own cost and on his own responsibility,— liberty.
Is there any violence in all this? Is there artificial levelling? Finally, is there any want of readiness to substitute something in the place of what we condemn? No, all we ask is the right to peaceably place Liberty in fair competition with privilege. Existing governments are pledged to deny this. Herein will reside the coming struggle. Who is the party of assault and violence? Is it the Anarchist, simply asking to be let alone in minding his own business, or is it the power which, aware that it cannot stand on its own merits, violently perpetuates itself by crushing all attempts to test its efficiency and pretensions through peaceable rivalry?”
― Frank H Brooks, The Individualist Anarchists: Anthology of Liberty, 1881-1908

“Tolstoy was not associated with any revolutionary group but his writings had a tremendous influence. A continuous stream of Utopians, rebels and cranks passed in and out of his doors. When I was a guest at Yasnaya Polyana, his country estate, I was shocked by the depth of his despondency, and after he had forecast, with a foresight given only to genius, the bloody upheavals to come, I left his presence deeply regretting that age, moral distress and spiritual loneliness rendered him incapable of looking joyfully forward to what many believed would be the birth of a great and enduring democratic Russian Republic.”
― Robert Hunter, Revolution Why, How, When?

“Sabe cuál es mi enfermedad? La utopía. Sabe cuál es la suya? La rutina. La utopía es el porvenir que se esfuerza en nacer. La rutina es el pasado que se obstina en seguir".”
― Victor Hugo

“I think if we don't ideate about futures that could be good, we won't be able to get them.”
― c Boucher (Grimes)

“It was hard to force people to give up their rights to apartments, and predictably, this radical Utopian ideal failed. But it does illustrate how the concept of social injustice in a communist society works: those who have are exceptions, and they should feel guilty and ashamed - the others are entitled to have, too, because it has been promised to them.”
― Slavenka Drakulić, Café Europa: Life After Communism

“.. to institute an effective totalitarian system or indeed any system at all you must offer some benefits and freedoms, at least to a privileged few, in return for those you remove." (308)

" ... no empire imposed by force or otherwise has ever been without this feature: control of the indigenous by members of their own group .. when power is scarce, a little of it is tempting" (308)”
― Atwood Margaret, The Handmaid's Tale