Utopia Quotes

“The change of the word does not alter the matter”
― Thomas More, Utopia

“Oh my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger.
Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.

There is one who remembers the way to your door:
Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.
You shall not deny the Stranger.

They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.
But the man that is shall shadow
The man that pretends to be.”
― T.S. Eliot

“If you do not want to stop the wheels of progress; if you do not want to go back to the Dark Ages; if you do not want to live again under tyranny, then you must guard your liberty, and you must not let the church get control of your government. If you do, you will lose the greatest legacy ever bequeathed to the human race—intellectual freedom.

Now let me tell you another thing. If all the energy and wealth wasted upon religion—in all of its varied forms—had been spent to understand life and its problems, we would today be living under conditions that would seem almost like Utopia. Most of our social and domestic problems would have been solved, and equally as important, our understanding and relations with the other peoples of the world would have, by now, brought about universal peace.

Man would have a better understanding of his motives and actions, and would have learned to curb his primitive instincts for revenge and retaliation. He would, by now, know that wars of hate, aggression, and aggrandizement are only productive of more hate and more human suffering.

The enlightened and completely emancipated man from the fears of a God and the dogma of hate and revenge would make him a brother to his fellow man.

He would devote his energies to discoveries and inventions, which theology previously condemned as a defiance of God, but which have proved so beneficial to him. He would no longer be a slave to a God and live in cringing fear!”
― Joseph Lewis, An Atheist Manifesto

“Be vary wary of people who declare that they're going to create heaven on earth, they almost invariably create hell.”
― François Lelord, Hector and the Search for Happiness

“Every dystopia is masked by a utopia.”
― Rose Lovejoy, Pick 7

“Utopian speculations ... must come back into fashion. They are a way of affirming faith in the possibility of solving problems that seem at the moment insoluble. Today even the survival of humanity is a utopian hope.”
― Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

“Idealists and reformers all become executioners in their turn. The road to utopia ends with the steps of the scaffold, the endless moment of the guillotine.”
― Grant Morrison, The Invisibles, Volume 1: Say You Want a Revolution

“It's tempting to ask why if you fed your neighbors during the time of the earthquake and fire, you didn't do so before or after.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster

“A philosophy untouched by the shadows on the wall can only yield a sterile utopia.”
― Michael J. Sandel, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?

“Mustapha Mond paused, put down the first book and, picking up the other, turned over the pages. “Take this, for example,” he said, and in his deep voice once more began to read: “’A man grows old; he feels in himself that radical sense of weakness, of listlessness, of discomfort, which accompanies the advance of age; and, feeling thus, imagines himself merely sick, lulling his fears with the notion that this distressing condition is due to some particular cause, from which, as from an illness, he hopes to recover. Vain imaginings! That sickness is old age; and a horrible disease it is.
They say that it is the fear of death and of what comes after death that makes men turn to religion as they advance in years. But my own experience has given me the conviction that, quite apart from any such terrors or imaginings, the religious sentiment tends to develop as we grow older; to develop because, as the passions grow calm, as the fancy and sensibilities are less excited and less excitable, our reason becomes less troubled in its working, less obscured by the images, desires and distractions, in which it used to be absorbed; whereupon God emerges as from behind a cloud; our soul feels, sees, turns towards the source of all light; turns naturally and inevitably; for now that all that gave to the world of sensations its life and charms has begun to leak away from us, now that phenomenal existence is no more bolstered up by impressions from within or from without, we feel the need to lean on something that abides, something that will never play us false-a reality, an absolute and everlasting truth. Yes, we inevitably turn to God; for this religious sentiment is of its nature so pure, so delightful to the soul that experiences it, that it makes up to us for all our other losses.”’ Mustapha Mond shut the book and leaned back in his chair. “One of the numerous things in heaven and earth that these philosophers didn’t dream about was this” (he waved his hand), “us, the modern world. ’You can only be independent of God while you’ve got youth and prosperity; independence won’t take you safely to the end.’ Well, we’ve now got youth and prosperity right up to the end. What follows? Evidently, that we can be independent of God. ’The religious sentiment will compensate us for all our losses.’ But there aren’t any losses for us to compensate; religious sentiment is superfluous. And why should we go hunting for a substitute for youthful desires, when youthful desires never fail? A substitute for distractions, when we go on enjoying all the old fooleries to the very last? What need have we of repose when our minds and bodies continue to delight in activity? of consolation, when we have soma? of something immovable, when there is the social order?”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“From being a movement aiming for universal freedom, communism turned into a system of universal despotism. That is the logic of utopia.”
― John Gray, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths

“If Utopia is not a place, but a people, then we must choose carefully, for the world is about to change, and in our story, Rapture was just the beginning.
-Eleanore Lamb”
― Bioshock

“She said all a body would have to do there [Heaven] was to go around all day long with a harp and sing, forever and ever.”
― Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

“A fictional Dystopia is better than a fake Utopia.”
― Robert Friedrich

“Revolutions produce other men, not new men. Halfway between truth and endless error, the mold of the species is permanent. That is Earth's burden.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The First Salute : View of the American Revolution

“And then," said Sarnac, "I remember that I made a prophecy. I made it - when did I make it? Two thousand years ago? Or two weeks ago? I sat in Fanny's little sitting-room, an old-world creature amidst her old-world furnishings, and I said that men and women would not always suffer as we were suffering then. I said that we were still poor savages, living only in the bleak dawn of civilisation, and that we suffered because we were under-bred, under-trained and darkly ignorant of ourselves, that the mere fact that we knew our own unhappiness was the promise of better things and that a day would come when charity and understanding would light the world so that men and women would no longer hurt themselves and one another as they were doing now everywhere, universally, in law and in restriction and in jealousy and in hate, all round and about the earth.”
― H.G. Wells, The Dream

“At the very moment when man is on the verge of realizing his hope, he begins to lose it.”
― Erich Fromm, 1984

“But the Modern Utopia must not be static but kinetic, must shape not as a permanent state but as a hopeful stage, leading to a long ascent of stages. Nowadays we do not resist and overcome the great stream of things, but rather float upon it. We build now not citadels, but ships of state.”
― H. G. Wells

“You can be with the 'truth' or you can cheat yourself by believing the big lie in front of you is the 'truth'. Those who are with the 'truth' are a minority, whom you may call Utopians.”
― Kandathil Sebastian, Dolmens in the Blue Mountain

“This lively health, when entirely free from all mixture of pain, of itself gives an inward pleasure, independent of all external objects of delight; and though this pleasure does not so powerfully affect us, nor act so strongly on the senses as some of the others, yet it may be esteemed as the greatest of all pleasures, and almost all the Utopians reckon it the foundation and basis of all the other joys of life; since this alone makes the state of life easy and desirable; and when this is wanting, a man is really capable of no other pleasure.”
― Thomas More, Utopia

“Conceive a world-society developed materially far beyond the wildest dreams of America. Unlimited power, derived partly from the artificial disintegration of atoms, partly from the actual annihilation of matter through the union of electrons and protons to form radiation, completely abolished the whole grotesque burden of drudgery which hitherto had seemed the inescapable price of civilization, nay of life itself. The vast economic routine of the world-community was carried on by the mere touching of appropriate buttons. Transport, mining, manufacture, and even agriculture were performed in this manner. And indeed in most cases the systematic co-ordination of these activities was itself the work of self-regulating machinery. Thus, not only was there no longer need for any human beings to spend their lives in unskilled monotonous labour, but further, much that earlier races would have regarded as highly skilled though stereotyped work, was now carried on by machinery. Only the pioneering of industry, the endless exhilarating research, invention, design and reorganization, which is incurred by an ever-changing society, still engaged the minds of men and women. And though this work was of course immense, it could not occupy the whole attention of a great world-community. Thus very much of the energy of the race was free to occupy itself with other no less difficult and exacting matters, or to seek recreation in its many admirable sports and arts. Materially every individual was a multi-millionaire, in that he had at his beck and call a great diversity of powerful mechanisms; but also he was a penniless friar, for he had no vestige of economic control over any other human being. He could fly through the upper air to the ends of the earth in an hour, or hang idle among the clouds all day long. His flying machine was no cumbersome aeroplane, but either a wingless aerial boat, or a mere suit of overalls in which he could disport himself with the freedom of a bird. Not only in the air, but in the sea also, he was free. He could stroll about the ocean bed, or gambol with the deep-sea fishes. And for habitation he could make his home, as he willed, either in a shack in the wilderness or in one of the great pylons which dwarfed the architecture even of the American age. He could possess this huge palace in loneliness and fill it with his possessions, to be automatically cared for without human service; or he could join with others and create a hive of social life. All these amenities he took for granted as the savage takes for granted the air which he breathes. And because they were as universally available as air, no one craved them in excess, and no one grudged another the use of them.”
― Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men

“Ma forse, la morte non era altro che un'onda solitaria che andava a spegnersi a riva, mentre infinite altre continuavano a solcare il mare.”
― Leonardo Patrignani, Utopia

“We have made some collective mistakes as a species, it’s true – invested too much power in things we can’t see, let alone control. But look at the world we have, Chiku. For all its failings, things could be a great deal worse. No one’s died in any wars lately, or been murdered, or left to rot in a prison, or been denied the basic allocation of fresh food and drinking water. No one’s been tortured for their beliefs or made to feel like a pariah because of their sexual preferences.”
― Alastair Reynolds, On the Steel Breeze

“Rakyat yang nasionalis hendaknya belajar menghemat energi. Pemimpin dan pemerintahan yang nasionalis hendaknya memikirkan cara-cara penghematan, bukan mengeksploitas sisa sumber daya alam yang kita miliki.

Kembangkan sistem transportasi massal yang memadai, sehingga jumlah kendaraan di jalan raya berkurang. Dengan sendirinya pemakaian bahan bakar akan berkurang.

Hentikan pembangunan menara-menara perkantoran dan apartemen-apartemen tinggi di perkotaan. Biarlah penghijauan di kota-kota besar tetap terpelihara. Pembangunan di daerah-daerah terpencil lebih diperhatikan. Biarlah orang di desa mendapatkan pekerjaan di desanya sendiri. Sehingga mereka tidak perlu menambah beban metropolis. Pembangunan harus merata, harus horizontal, tidak vertikal.”
― Anand Krishna, Indonesia Under Attack! Membangkitkan Kembali Jati Diri Bangsa

“Conosco una sola persona in grado di provvedere alla mia libertà, e quella persona sorride ogni mattina nel mio specchio.”
― Leonardo Patrignani, Utopia

“...I don't know where a utopia is supposed to be, or where one could be found. I sometimes think that it is the place where fear and doubt end with the realization that around you is everything you need, and there is nothing else to find.”
― Kira Salak, Four Corners: A Journey into the Heart of Papua New Guinea

“La fede assoluta in soluzioni razionali e la proliferazione della letteratura utopistica sono due aspetti di stadi consimili dello sviluppo culturale, nell'Atene classica come nel Rinascimento italiano, nel settecento francese come nei due secoli successivi, e non meno oggi che nel passato recente o remoto.”
― Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas

“Immanuel Kant, un uomo lontanissimo dall'irrazionalismo, osservò una volta che "dal legno storto dell'umanità non si è mai cavata una cosa diritta". È questo il motivo per cui nessuna soluzione perfetta è possibile nelle cose umane - non già soltanto in pratica, ma in linea di principio - e ogni serio tentativo di metterla in atto è destinato con ogni probabilità a produrre sofferenza, delusione e fallimento.”
― Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas

“I più celebrati utopisti dei tempi moderni... offrono un quadro pressochè statico degli attributi essenziali dell'uomo e, di conseguenza, una descrizione altrettanto statica della società perfetta ritenuta raggiungibile. Con ciò essi ignorano il carattere degli uomini in quanto esseri che si autotrasformano, che sono capaci di libere scelte - entro i limiti imposti dalla natura e dalla storia - fra scopi contrastanti e reciprocamente incompatibili.”
― Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas

“The ticket to Utopia ia real Love that springs from within us.”
― Katerina Kostaki, The Angels Planet: Tales from Alcyone Pleiades Constellation