Quotes About Utopias

science fiction begins not with Gernsback, Wells, Verne or Shelley, but rather with the Protestant Reformation, when science as we now understand the term began to separate itself from magic as the idiom for fantastic voyages, utopias, future speculation and technological extrapolation.

We spoke and acted as if, given the opportunity for self-government, we would quickly create utopias. Instead injustice, even tyranny, is rampant.

One must live, act and think now, in this life, as if one were worthy of a hoped immortality. To be brief, find and communicate the truth, if possible. Beware of prejudice and utopias, of all dogmas, including those that are one's own. Live without submission and without compromise. For me, this is the ethics of the thinker and the foundation of what I mean by philosophy.

What is remarkable is that Marx, precisely because he agreed with Hegel in rejecting the construction of abstract utopias, became probably the greatest utopian in the history of philosophy

Sex is often centre stage in utopias and dystopias – who can do what, with which set of genital organs, and with whom, being one of humanity's main preoccupations.

The glory of the world is transitory, and we should not measure our lives by it, but by the choice we make to follow our personal legend, to believe in our utopias, and to fight for our dreams.

From aloof academics to career government cronies, President Barack Obama filled his Cabinet with individuals whose greatest achievements were dreaming up unworkable Democratic utopias from the far off perches of academia and Washington bureaucracy.

But utopias always lead to dystopias, and dictators invariably become gods who demand daily worship.

What was the matter that pureness of feeling couldn't be kept up? I see I met those writers in the big book of utopias at a peculiar time. In those utopias, set up by hopes and art, how could you overlook the part of nature or be sure you could keep the feelings up?

It may be that the best we can hope for when it comes to utopias is that they be held at arm's length and regarded as aesthetic constructions, in which various proportions are neatly worked out, contradictions eliminated, and outside intrusions minimized. They are fictions, artifacts of culture. And we should be wary if they ever become much more.

All the Utopias - Brook Farm, Robert Owen's sanctuary of chatter, Upton Sinclair's Helicon Hall - and their regulation end in scandal, feuds, poverty, griminess, disillusion.

There are eras of decline in which the form our inner life is destined to take becomes blurred. In these periods, we stagger this way and that like creatures who have lost their balance. We sink from hollow joys into dull sorrow, and a pervasive sense of loss lends the future and the past a more alluring air. And so we maunder through remote pasts or distant utopias while the present moment vanishes.

The curious sterility of utopias comes from the absence within them of any scope for initiative, any room for plurality.

Las utopías, y sus héroes y santos, cualquiera sea su signo religioso, nacionalista o comunista, no son solo sueños inútiles pero destinados al fracaso, no son solo sueños que embellecen la vida. Son nefastas porque obstaculizan el avance posible del mundo y provocan sufrimientos a millones para nada.

But utopias don't exist, of course, anywhere in any world. Like alchemy or perpetual motion.

Historically, it is chiefly in times of physical, political, economic and spiritual distress that men's eyes turn with anxious hope to the future, and when anticipations, utopias and apocalyptic visions multiply.

Pioneers did not produce original works of art, because they were creating original human environments; they did not imagine Utopias because they were shaping them.

The effect of boredom on a large scale in history is underestimated. It is a main cause of revolutions, and would soon bring to an end all the static Utopias and the farmyard civilization of the Fabians.

Reactionaries often describe both Marx and Lenin as theorists, without taking into consideration that their utopias inspired Russia and China - the two countries called upon to lead a new world which will allow for human survival if imperialism does not first unleash a criminal, exterminating war.

Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies.

Men readily listen to Utopias, and are easily induced to believe that in some wonderful manner everybody will become everybody's friend, especially when someone is heard denouncing the evils now existing,... which are said to arise out of the possession of private property. These evils, however, arise from quite another source—the wickedness of human nature.

Utopias of equality are biologically doomed[.]

There is nevertheless a value in painting these pictures of our desire; man's significances is that he can image a better world, and will some part of it at least into reality; man is an animal that makes Utopias. (p.47/543)

There is nevertheless a value in painting these pictures of our desire; man's significances is that he can image a better world, and will some part of it at least into reality; man is an animal that makes Utopias. (Chapter on Plato p.47/543)