Quotes About Dystopia

New York makes one think of the collapse of civilization, about Sodom and Gomorrah, the end of the world. The end wouldn't come as a surprise here. Many people already bank on it.

they walked with a pedatory grace.... one of them ripped off their hood and said, my name is Tally Youngblood and is a special circumstance....

Chicago is a pocket edition of hell," he wrote, "and if it is not, then hell is a pocket edition of Chicago.

Orwell envisioned a future in which an all-seeing dictatorship would stamp out free thinking and outlaw human intimacy. But the internet has given us something far closer to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World than Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Orwell's fear was that Big Brother would always be watching you. Huxley's dread was that we would be too busy watching Big Brother on TV to care. There is no need to ban books if people are not reading them. If the people are entertained, they will also be docile.

in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Science fiction likes to depict a dystopia in which the robots have taken over. A less fantastical idea is that the robots will indeed take over. But it will be at the behest of a narrow elite of human masters.

We are entering the Dark Ages, my friend, but this time there will be lots of neon, and screen savers, and street lighting.

From our myopia arose our dystopia.

The Running Man is a sci-fi action story based on a novel by Stephen King, built around a nightmare vision of America in 2017—thirty years from when we were shooting. The economy is in a depression, and the United States has become a fascist state where the government uses TV and giant screens in the neighborhoods to distract people from the fact that nobody has a job.

You've got to give an audience something to root for. The minute you get into more dystopian shows, where everything's really dark, and no one has any hope, and there's no positive goal we're working toward, it's a bummer. You run out of gas with them. Because you need to know, 'What am I in this for? What am I rooting for?'

When 'Ghost in the Shell' was first made, it was so prescient. It was sci-fi.

Science fiction has done a really good job of scaring us into thinking that computers shouldn't get too smart, because as soon as they get really smart, they're going to take over the world and kill us, or something like that. But why would they do that?

Our problem right now is that we're so specialized that if the lights go out, there are a huge number of people who are not going to know what to do. But within every dystopia there's a little utopia.

'The Handmaid's Tale' is not a book or show advocating enslaving women or creating a theocracy. It's not glorifying that. It's talking about what happens if that happens.

Next thing you know they'll take your thoughts away.

For me, the best thing about Cyberpunk is that it taught me how to enjoy shopping malls, which used to terrify me. Now I just imagine the whole thing is two miles below the moon's surface, and that half the people's right-brains have been eaten by roboticized steel rats. And suddenly it's interesting again.

She wasn't there. He wouldn't have had to look too closely. She stood out from others like an angel in hell or a rose in a sewer.

That was the original idea, but once you've got a controlled population with a wall around it and no oversight, you can do anything you want.

Because citizens were always a bit like inmates and inmates were always a bit like citizens, so Consilience and Positron have only made it official.

My red skirt is hitched up to my waist, though no higher. Below it the Commander is fucking. What he is fucking is the lower part of my body.

There were pockets within pockets, with a CorpSeCorps hand in each one of them.

The Aunts had their methods, and their informants: no walls were solid for them, no doors locked.

What will Ofwarren give birth to? A baby, as we all hope? Or something else, an Unbaby, with a pinhead or a snout like a dog's, or two bodies, or a hole in its heart or no arms, or webbed hands and feet? There's no telling. They could tell once, with machines, but that is now outlawed. What would be the point of knowing, anyway? You can't have them taken out; whatever it is must be carried to term.

Our problem right now is that we're so specialized that if the lights go out, there are a huge number of people who are not going to know what to do. But within every dystopia there's a little utopia.