Quotes and Sayings about Utopia
"Hunger and sex still dominate the primitive mammalian side of human existence, but at the present time it looks as if humanity were within sight of their satisfaction. Permanent plenty, no longer a Utopian dream, awaits the arrival of permanent peace."
- John Desmond Bernal
(Related: Peace, Time, Sex, Dream, Existence, Humanity, Hunger, Present, Satisfaction, Sight)
"Those who made and endorsed our Constitution knew man's nature, and it is to their ideas, rather than to the temptations of utopia, that we must ask that our judges adhere."
- Robert Bork
(Related: Nature, Ideas, Constitution, Judges, Man, Temptations, Utopia)
"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
(Related: Peace, Effect, Meetings, states)
"Also by my earliest days, I was fascinated by a utopian vision of what the world could be like. I've thought that science could be the basis for a better world, and that's what I've been trying to do all these years."
- George E. Brown, Jr.
(Related: Science, Thought, Vision, Trying, World, Years)
"Perhaps the greatest utopia would be if we could all realize that no utopia is possible; no place to run, no place to hide, just take care of business here and now."
- Jack Carroll
(Related: Business, Care, Now, Utopia)
"Why have we had to invent Eden, to live submerged in the nostalgia of a lost paradise, to make up utopias, propose a future for ourselves?"
- Julio Cortazar
(Related: Future, Paradise, Nostalgia)
"Global warming has melted the polar ice caps, raised the levels of the oceans and flooded the earth's great cities. Despite its evident prosperity, New Jersey is scarcely Utopia."
- Godfried Danneels
(Related: Cities, Earth, Global warming, Oceans, Prosperity, Utopia)
"The house a woman creates is a Utopia. She can't help it - can't help trying to interest her nearest and dearest not in happiness itself but in the search for it."
- Marguerite Duras
(Related: Happiness, Help, Interest, Trying, Utopia, Woman)
"Around 1967 I began backing away from dogmatic Leninism, not so much because I thought it was false, I just decided there was nothing utopian about it."
- Henry Flynt
(Related: Thought, Nothing)
"Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labeled Utopian."
- Emma Goldman
(Related: Change, Vision, Possibilities, Race)
"If work and leisure are soon to be subordinated to this one utopian principle - absolute busyness - then utopia and melancholy will come to coincide: an age without conflict will dawn, perpetually busy - and without consciousness."
- Gunther Grass
(Related: Age, Work, Busyness, Conflict, Consciousness, Dawn, Leisure, Melancholy, Utopia, Will)
"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
(Related: Happiness, Virtue, Prison, Project, Utopia)
"I can't think of anyone who is up on evolutionary psychology and related areas who is deluded enough to be called a utopian."
- Keith Henson
(Related: Psychology)
"Utopianism is probably a necessary social device for generating the superhuman efforts without which no major revolution is achieved."
- Eric Hobsbawm
(Related: Revolution)
"Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal."
- Victor Hugo
(Related: Death, Dreams, Life, Utopia)
"The commune movement is part of a reawakening of belief in the possibilities for utopia that existed in the nineteenth century and exist again today, a belief that by creating the right social institution, human satisfaction and growth can be achieved."
- Rosabeth Moss Kanter
(Related: Belief, Growth, Possibilities, Right, Satisfaction, Today, Utopia)
"Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness."
- Helen Keller
(Related: Embarrassment, Friends, Literature, Senses, Talk, Utopia)
"The president's dream of a worldwide liberal utopia is going to undermine the security of the United States."
- Peter King
(Related: Dream, Liberal, President, Security, states, United, Utopia)
"For other nations, utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is just beyond the horizon."
- Henry A. Kissinger
(Related: Americans, Nations, Past, Utopia)
"The great universal family of men is a utopia worthy of the most mediocre logic."
- Isidore Ducasse Lautreamont
(Related: Family, Men, Logic, Utopia)
"An acre in Middlesex is better than a principality in Utopia."
- Thomas B. Macaulay
(Related: Utopia)
"To know oneself is to disbelieve utopia."
- Michael Novak
(Related: Utopia)
"Jews do not have to be Christians. Christianity is an offshoot of Judaism, but too utopian, too hopeful, too unrealistic a turn."
- Michael Novak
(Related: Christianity, Judaism)
"Although images of perfection in people's personal lives can cause unhappiness, images of perfect societies - utopian images - can cause monstrous evil. In fact, forcefully changing society to conform to societal images was the greatest cause of evil in the twentieth century."
- Dennis Prager
(Related: Society, People, Cause, Evil, Fact, Perfection, Unhappiness)
"We are at heart so profoundly anarchistic that the only form of state we can imagine living in is Utopian; and so cynical that the only Utopia we can believe in is authoritarian."
- Lionel Trilling
(Related: Heart, Living, State, Utopia)
"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
(Related: Cancer, Cure, Prejudice, Utopia, Will)
"Our aims in political activism are not, and should not be, to create a perfect utopia."
- Paul Wellstone
(Related: Activism, Utopia)
"All my writing is about the recognition that there is no single reality. But the beauty of it is that you nevertheless go on, walking towards utopia, which may not exist, on a bridge which might end before you reach the other side."
- Marguerite Young
(Related: Beauty, End, May, Reality, Utopia, Walking, Writing)
"I believe that all my work explores the human desire or obsession for utopias, and the structure of all my works is the search for utopias lost and rediscovered."
- Marguerite Young
(Related: Work, Desire, Obsession)
"I would say my theme has always been paradise lost, always the lost cause, the lost leader, the lost utopia."
- Marguerite Young
(Related: Leader, Cause, Paradise, Utopia)