Post by Great Shaman on Mar 28, 2011 21:01:03 GMT -8
Our business here is to be Utopian, to make vivid and credible, if we can, first this facet and then that, of an imaginary whole and happy world.
H.G. WELLS, A Modern Utopia
The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, The Scarlet Letter
All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in.
TONI MORRISON, Online NewsHour interview, Mar. 9, 1998
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.
BUCKMINSTER FULLER, Critical Path
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.
GEORGE ORWELL, Why Socialists Don't Believe in Fun
In the next few years the struggle will not be between utopia and reality, but between different utopias, each trying to impose itself on reality ... we can no longer hope to save everything, but ... we can at least try to save lives, so that some kind of future, if perhaps not the ideal one, will remain possible.
ALBERT CAMUS, Between Hell and Reason
Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.
VICTOR HUGO, Intellectual Autobiography
If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there’d be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.
NADINE GORDIMER, Burger's Daughter
Life without utopia is suffocating, for the multitude at least: threatened otherwise with petrifaction, the world must have a new madness.
E.M. CIORAN, History and Utopia
Utopia is the grotesque en rose, the need to associate happiness -- that is, the improbable -- with becoming, and to coerce an optimistic, aerial vision to the point where it rejoins its own source: the very cynicism it sought to combat. In short, a monstrous fantasy.
E.M. CIORAN, History and Utopia
Melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.
GUNTER GRASS, "On Stasis in Progress," From the Diary of a Snail
I can imagine no man who will look with more horror on the End than a conscientious revolutionary who has, in a sense sincerely, been justifying cruelties and injustices inflicted on millions of his contemporaries by the benefits which he hopes to confer on future generations: generations who, as one terrible moment now reveals to him, were never going to exist. Then he will see the massacres, the faked trials, the deportations, to be all ineffaceably real, an essential part, his part, in the drama that has just ended: while the future Utopia had never been anything but a fantasy.
C.S. LEWIS, The World's Last Night
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.
OSCAR WILDE, The Soul of Man Under Socialism
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.
THOMAS MORE, Utopia
Utopia is that which is in contradiction with reality.
ALBERT CAMUS, Between Hell and Reason
The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Grey Eminence
Human beings will be happier — not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie — but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That’s my utopia.
KURT VONNEGUT, JR., Playboy interview, 1973
None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.
THEODOR WIESENGRUND ADORNO, Minima Moralia
Nothing, not even a Utopia, can necessarily make the pursuit of happiness a successful one that ends in capture. The best society can merely allow every individual to flourish in the pursuit.
DANIEL NETTLE, Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile
We want our Utopia now.
SINCLAIR LEWIS, Main Street
H.G. WELLS, A Modern Utopia
The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, The Scarlet Letter
All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in.
TONI MORRISON, Online NewsHour interview, Mar. 9, 1998
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.
BUCKMINSTER FULLER, Critical Path
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.
GEORGE ORWELL, Why Socialists Don't Believe in Fun
In the next few years the struggle will not be between utopia and reality, but between different utopias, each trying to impose itself on reality ... we can no longer hope to save everything, but ... we can at least try to save lives, so that some kind of future, if perhaps not the ideal one, will remain possible.
ALBERT CAMUS, Between Hell and Reason
Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.
VICTOR HUGO, Intellectual Autobiography
If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there’d be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.
NADINE GORDIMER, Burger's Daughter
Life without utopia is suffocating, for the multitude at least: threatened otherwise with petrifaction, the world must have a new madness.
E.M. CIORAN, History and Utopia
Utopia is the grotesque en rose, the need to associate happiness -- that is, the improbable -- with becoming, and to coerce an optimistic, aerial vision to the point where it rejoins its own source: the very cynicism it sought to combat. In short, a monstrous fantasy.
E.M. CIORAN, History and Utopia
Melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.
GUNTER GRASS, "On Stasis in Progress," From the Diary of a Snail
I can imagine no man who will look with more horror on the End than a conscientious revolutionary who has, in a sense sincerely, been justifying cruelties and injustices inflicted on millions of his contemporaries by the benefits which he hopes to confer on future generations: generations who, as one terrible moment now reveals to him, were never going to exist. Then he will see the massacres, the faked trials, the deportations, to be all ineffaceably real, an essential part, his part, in the drama that has just ended: while the future Utopia had never been anything but a fantasy.
C.S. LEWIS, The World's Last Night
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.
OSCAR WILDE, The Soul of Man Under Socialism
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.
THOMAS MORE, Utopia
Utopia is that which is in contradiction with reality.
ALBERT CAMUS, Between Hell and Reason
The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Grey Eminence
Human beings will be happier — not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie — but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That’s my utopia.
KURT VONNEGUT, JR., Playboy interview, 1973
None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.
THEODOR WIESENGRUND ADORNO, Minima Moralia
Nothing, not even a Utopia, can necessarily make the pursuit of happiness a successful one that ends in capture. The best society can merely allow every individual to flourish in the pursuit.
DANIEL NETTLE, Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile
We want our Utopia now.
SINCLAIR LEWIS, Main Street