Utopia Quotes

“There are also those who delusively if not enthusiastically surrender their liberty for the mastermind’s false promises of human and societal perfectibility. He hooks them with financial bribes in the form of ‘entitlements.’ And he makes incredible claims about indefectible health, safety, educational, and environmental policies, the success of which is to be measured not in the here and now but in the distant future.
For these reasons and more, some become fanatics for the cause. They take to the streets and, ironically, demand their own demise as they protest against their own self-determination and for ever more autocracy and authoritarianism. When they vote, they vote to enchain not only their fellow citizens but, unwittingly, themselves. Paradoxically, as the utopia metastasizes and the society ossifies, elections become less relevant. More and more decisions are made by the masterminds and their experts, who substitute their self-serving and dogmatic judgments — which are proclaimed righteous and compassionate — for the the individual’s self-interests and best interests.”
― Mark R. Levin, Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America

“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

“You can use your idealism to further your aims, if you realize that nothing is Nirvana, nothing is perfect.”
― Jon Stewart

“I grew up in a utopia, I did. California when I was a child was a child's paradise, I was healthy, well fed, well clothed, well housed. I went to school and there were libraries with all the world in them and after school I played in orange groves and in Little League and in the band and down at the beach and every day was an adventure. . . . I grew up in utopia.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Pacific Edge

“As I’m fond of saying, if you want to find utopia, take a sharp right on money and a sharp left on sex and it’s straight ahead.”
― Penn Jillette

“And in heaven's name, who are the public enemies?" exclaimed Dr. Leete. "Are they France, England Germany or hunger, cold and nakedness?”
― Edward Bellamy

“Sometimes it's possible, just barely possible, to imagine a version of this world different from the existing one, a world in which there is true justice, heroic honesty, a clear perception possessed by each individual about how to treat all the others. Sometimes I swear I could see it, glittering in the pavement, glowing between the words in a stranger's sentence, a green, impossible vision--the world as it was meant to be, like a mist around the world as it is.”
― Ben H. Winters, Underground Airlines

“Sometimes I think Earth has got to be the insane asylum of the universe. . . and I'm here by computer error. At sixty-eight, I hope I've gained some wisdom in the past fourteen lustrums and it’s obligatory to speak plain and true about the conclusions I've come to; now that I have been educated to believe by such mentors as Wells, Stapledon, Heinlein, van Vogt, Clarke, Pohl, (S. Fowler) Wright, Orwell, Taine, Temple, Gernsback, Campbell and other seminal influences in scientifiction, I regret the lack of any female writers but only Radclyffe Hall opened my eyes outside sci-fi.

I was a secular humanist before I knew the term. I have not believed in God since childhood's end. I believe a belief in any deity is adolescent, shameful and dangerous. How would you feel, surrounded by billions of human beings taking Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the tooth fairy and the stork seriously, and capable of shaming, maiming or murdering in their name? I am embarrassed to live in a world retaining any faith in church, prayer or a celestial creator. I do not believe in Heaven, Hell or a Hereafter; in angels, demons, ghosts, goblins, the Devil, vampires, ghouls, zombies, witches, warlocks, UFOs or other delusions; and in very few mundane individuals--politicians, lawyers, judges, priests, militarists, censors and just plain people. I respect the individual's right to abortion, suicide and euthanasia. I support birth control. I wish to Good that society were rid of smoking, drinking and drugs.

My hope for humanity - and I think sensible science fiction has a beneficial influence in this direction - is that one day everyone born will be whole in body and brain, will live a long life free from physical and emotional pain, will participate in a fulfilling way in their contribution to existence, will enjoy true love and friendship, will pity us 20th century barbarians who lived and died in an atrocious, anachronistic atmosphere of arson, rape, robbery, kidnapping, child abuse, insanity, murder, terrorism, war, smog, pollution, starvation and the other negative “norms” of our current civilization. I have devoted my life to amassing over a quarter million pieces of sf and fantasy as a present to posterity and I hope to be remembered as an altruist who would have been an accepted citizen of Utopia.”
― Forrest J. Ackerman

“There is no way I can avoid thinking about the kind of world I belong to. The abuse of utopias disfigures everything.”
― Floriano Martins

“the human mind was no better than in its earliest period of savagery, only better informed”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland

“Freeways flickering; cell phones chiming a tune
We're riding to Utopia; road map says we'll be arriving soon
Captains of the old order clinging to the reins
Assuring us these aches inside are only growing pains
But it's a long road out of Eden
(...)
Behold the bitten apple, the power of the tools
But all the knowledge in the world is of no use to fools
And it's a long road out of Eden”
― The Eagles, Long Road Out of Eden

“Well, gentlemen, I have listened to all your Solutions, and I now inform you that I, and I alone, except perhaps for Walt Trowbridge and the ghost of Pareto, have the perfect, the inevitable, the only Solution, and that is: There is no Solution! There will never be a state of society anything like perfect!

"There never will be a time when there won't be a large proportion of people who feel poor no matter how much they have, and envy their neighbors who know how to wear cheap clothes showily, and envy their neighbors who can dance or make love or digest better.”
― Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

“En el campo…
En el campo… Me encantaba el campo. Quería estar lejos de las ciudades,
lejos de la excitación. Sólo me apetecía tumbarme de espaldas bajo un árbol y
leer un libro o dibujar, y dejar de preocuparme porque me asaltaran, dejar de
llevar una faca o terminar casado con alguna fulana como una cabra. Así debía
de ser el campo, pensé ensoñadoramente.”
― S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders

“Son tan diferentes los paladares de los mortales, tan torpes las inteligencias de algunos, tan ingratos los ánimos, tan absurdos los juicios, que les son más simpáticos los que se conceden una vida alegre y suelta que los que se molestan con preocupaciones y con el estudio de algo que pueda servir de provecho y placer para los ingratos y los maledicentes. La mayor parte no conoce las letras, y muchos las rechazan. El bárbaro repele lo que no es perfectamente bárbaro.”
― Thomas More, Utopia

“In agricultural communities, male leadership in the hunt ceased to be of much importance. As the discipline of the hunting band decayed, the political institutions of the earliest village settlements perhaps approximated the anarchism which has remained ever since the ideal of peaceful peasantries all round the earth. Probably religious functionaries, mediators between helpless mankind and the uncertain fertility of the earth, provided an important form of social leadership. The strong hunter and man of prowess, his occupation gone or relegated to the margins of social life, lost the umambiguous primacy which had once been his; while the comparatively tight personal subordination to a leader necessary to the success of a hunting party could be relaxed in proportion as grain fields became the center around which life revolved.

Among predominantly pastoral peoples, however, religious-political institutions took a quite different turn. To protect the flocks from animal predators required the same courage and social discipline which hunters had always needed. Among pastoralists, likewise, the principal economic activity- focused, as among the earliest hunters, on a parasitic relation to animals- continued to be the special preserve of menfolk. Hence a system of patrilineal families, united into kinship groups under the authority of a chieftain responsible for daily decisions as to where to seek pasture, best fitted the conditions of pastoral life. In addition, pastoralists were likely to accord importance to the practices and discipline of war. After all, violent seizure of someone else’s animals or pasture grounds was the easiest and speediest way to wealth and might be the only means of survival in a year of scant vegetation.

Such warlikeness was entirely alien to communities tilling the soil. Archeological remains from early Neolithic villages suggest remarkably peaceful societies. As long as cultivable land was plentiful, and as long as the labor of a single household could not produce a significant surplus, there can have been little incentive to war. Traditions of violence and hunting-party organization presumably withered in such societies, to be revived only when pastoral conquest superimposed upon peaceable villagers the elements of warlike organization from which civilized political institutions without exception descend.”
― William H. McNeill

“She liked who she was becoming, despite the pain and frustration it brought.”
― B. Barmanbek, Culpa Innata

“Reform is not instantaneous, but proceeds by degrees. In contrast, the dogmatist dreams of reforming all of society in one holistic sweep and believes that he has in his possession a unique, unalterable blueprint. This quest for a utopia leads to authoritarianism, intolerance and violence because, once the end goal has been defined, no one is allowed to criticize or change it.”
― Pervez Hoodbhoy, Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality

“Despairing of an aim, salvation or an ideal, we invent for ourselves the easiest solution: happiness.
Here again we begin with utopia - the ideal of happiness - and end in achieved happiness, the highest stage of happiness. The same abreaction to integral happiness as to integral
reality or freedom: these are all unbearable.
In the end, it is the opposite form of misfortune, the victim ideology, that triumphs.
Being incapable of accepting thought (the idea that the world thinks us, the intelligence of evil), we invent the easiest solution, the technical solution: Artificial Intelligence.
The highest stage of intelligence: integral knowledge.
This time the rejection will arise perhaps from a resistance on the part of things themselves to their digital transparency or from a failure of the system in the form of a major accident.
Against all the sovereign hypotheses are ranged the easiest solutions.
And all the easiest solutions lead to catastrophe.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact

“Thus the Utopia of terrestrial paradise implies an absolute humanity within the transitory relations of terrestrial history. But there is no room in terrestrial reality, by its nature strictly confined and limited, for an absolute life. Yet the Utopia theory asserts that what has been impossible until now will not be so always, that an absolute and conclusive state will sooner or later crown historical relations. It affirms, not a transition from limited historical relations to some other plane of being, to some fourth dimension commensurable with the closed three dimensional world, but a fourth dimension of absolute life within the very framework of three-dimensional space. In this lie its fundamental metaphysical antithesis and essential instability, instead of seeing absolute life as the transition from terrestrial to, celestial history, it presupposes an ultimate solution of human destiny within the framework of terrestrial relations, a final integration of the three-dimensional world. It desires to humanize that absolute perfection and beatitude which can only be attained in the celestial reality and only contained in the fourth dimension.”
― Nicolas Berdyaev, The Meaning of History

“Unlike in other utopian novels, the forces of evil here are not omnipotent; Nabokov shows us their frailty as well. They are ridiculous and can be defeated, and this does not lessen the tragedy- the waste.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“O! But above all else, in a "perfect world", my friend
There would be no sonnets to sing and no stories to tell”
― Ronak Shah, In Search of Starlight

“What a thrilling world this could be if only we would never again have to indulge the brutal sin of war-making . . . Instead of wasting our energies in hostility and our wealth on weaponry, we could send art to the moon, exalt our Pasternaks instead of isolating them. We could feed and house and clothe everyone forever; lick cancer in a week; harness the sun's energy; learn a few languages; talk, travel, grow, and love.
[ -- Leonard Bernstein's closing remarks following his 1959 Moscow concert program telecast nationwide in the United States]”
― Burton Bernstein , Leonard Bernstein: American Original

“Quando o teu Platão decreta que as repúblicas só serão felizes se os filósofos reinarem ou se os reis filosofarem, quão longe estará a felicidade se os filósofos não condescenderem nem mesmo a repartir um conselho com o reis?" [Morus]
"Eles não são", respondeu Rafael, "tão ingratos que não fariam isso prazerosamente. Na verdade, muitos já o fizeram em seus livros: se aqueles que podem assenhorar-se das coisas estivessem preparados, bem os consultando conseguiriam seus conselhos. Sem dúvidas, porém, como bem já previu Platão, a não ser que os próprios reis filosofassem, nunca, impregnados e infectados desde a infância por opiniões corrompidas, nunca reconheceriam detalhadamente os conselhos dos filósofos, o que Platão também pôde experimentar junto a Dionísio de Siracusa. Acaso não pensas que, se eu propusesse princípios sensatos a algum rei e me esforçasse por eliminar, dele, as perniciosas sementes dos males, eu seria prontamente expulso ou, então, considerado com escárnio?" Editora Vozes, 2016, p. 40.”
― Thomas Morus, A Utopia

“Everyone had enough to eat, plenty to do, outlets for individual creativity and personal satisfaction.”
― Alan Dean Foster, The Hand of Dinotopia

“Un modo di rendere produttive, in senso fantastico, le parole, è quello di deformarle. Lo fanno i bambini, per gioco: un gioco che ha un contenuto molto serio, perché li aiuta a esplorare le possibilità delle parole, a dominarle, forzandole a declinazioni inedite; stimola la loro libertà di «parlanti», con diritto alla loro personale "parole" (grazie, signor Saussure); incoraggia in loro l'anticonformismo.
Nello spirito di questo gioco è l'uso di un prefisso arbitrario. Io stesso vi ho fatto ricorso più volte.
Basta una "s" a trasformare un «temperino» - oggetto quotidiano e trascurabile, per di più pericoloso e offensivo - in uno «stemperino», oggetto fantastico e pacifista, che non serve a far la punta alle matite, ma a fargliela ricrescere quand'è consunta. Con rabbia dei cartolai e dell'ideologia consumistica. Non senza allusioni di colore sessuale, ben occultate, ma non per questo non recepibili (sotto il livello della coscienza) dai bambini.
Lo stesso prefisso mi dà lo «staccapanni», cioè il contrario dell'«attaccapanni»: non serve per appendervi gli abiti, ma per staccarli quando se ne ha bisogno, in un paese di vetrine senza vetri, negozi senza cassa e guardaroba senza scontrino. Dal prefisso all'utopia. Ma non è certo vietato immaginare una città futura in cui i cappotti siano gratuiti come l'acqua e l'aria. E l'utopia non è meno educativa dello spirito critico."
8. Il prefisso arbitrario, p. 31”
― Gianni Rodari, Grammatica della Fantasia: Introduzione all'Arte di Inventare Storie

“Reimagine 2025 by Stewart Stafford

Imagine no Viagra,
Put yourself at ease,
Flags at half-mast, limp,
No one worthy to please.

Imagine no more Temu,
It’s costly if you try,
No tacky deals to tempt us,
Prices rocketing sky-high.

Imagine all the suckers,
Chasing Black Friday deals —
Whoa.

You don’t pay for illegal streaming,
First, it works and then it’s gone,
I hope someday Hollywood joins us,
And binge-watchers will live as one.

Imagine all your neighbours,
Squatters on your Wi-Fi?
Why?

Imagine no porch pirates,
I wonder if Jeff Bezos can?
No toilet paper gold rush,
A calmer state of Man.

You may say we're screen-addicted,
Babies swiping, having "fun",
Messiahs made of viral nonsense,
Pull the plug and we are done!

© 2025, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“as soon as want and suffering permit rest to a man, ennui is at once so near that he necessarily requires diversion," —i. e., more suffering. Even if the socialist Utopia were attained, innumerable evils would be left, because some of them —like strife — are essential to life; and if every evil were removed, and strife were altogether ended, boredom would become as intolerable as pain.”
― Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy

“Time was to prove that the political divisions of modern commentators into Left- and Right-wing make little difference in the world of Ideal States. The government of such a Utopia may be of a Left-wing or a Right-wing complexion; the one characteristic which marks it off from pragmatically established states is its preconception. The principles of government are known. They are not to be established by experiment. It is the Platonic, rather than the Aristotelian approach. Such states, nations, or colonies, because of the nature of the thought which has engendered them, are liable to be what is nowadays called totalitarian, but might—given the idea of a secular religion—just as well be called theocratic. The occultist might feel called, like Thomas Lake Harris, to establish Utopia on occult principles; which occult principles will then determine how the colony is to be conducted. The socialist or the nationalist establishes his Ideal State—for every revolutionary aims to establish at least some portion of Utopia—on the basis of another principle: the unity of the Volk, or the equality of mankind. The secular form of the faith does not mean that its application is any less theocratic than the application of Christian standards during the Middle Ages. There is in any society an accepted wisdom, and the struggle for Utopia represents the struggle to impose one's own interpretation of the universe on society—to become Established in one's own right.”
― James Webb, Occult Underground, The

“Utopias are often just premature truths”
― Alphonse de Lamartine

“– Did you know that some machines dream, Otto? The digital chimeras – even without a mouth, I know Orion is smiling. – Before you woke me up, I was dreaming. I dreamed of a human who promises to entwine his girlfriend, and that she would swallow the moon and white lightning would come out from the tips of her hair. This dream has no color, it is in black and white. While you were sleeping in The Rats’ Sewer, I dreamed of a lonely robot who lives collecting forgettings. This dream is colorful, joyful. When I am turned off, I can see things that don’t exist.”
― Ian Fraser