Utopia Quotes - Page 8

• Architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience.

  Roland Barthes

  Dream, Expression, Architecture

  Roland Barthes (1997). “The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies”, p.6, Univ of California Press

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• Only from the perspective of such a utopia is it possible to use the concepts of pessimism and optimism with full justification: an optimist is someone who thinks that on planet number five the history of mankind will be less bloody. A pessimist is one who thinks otherwise.

  Milan Kundera

  Thinking, Numbers, Optimism

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• There are no utopia jobs on this earth, .. There's nobody out there that can say, 'I've got the ideal job and there are no problems.' If your self worth is based on what other people think of you, you're in trouble. My self worth is not based on them. My self worth is based on my faith, how I treat others, what I'm doing right for this program and these kids and this coaching staff. Other than that, I understand you're not going to please everybody.

  Chan Gailey

  Jobs, Kids, Thinking

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• Utopia is a meta-utopia: the environment in which Utopian experiments may be tried out; the environment in which people are free to do their own thing; the environment which must, to a great extent, be realized first if more particular Utopian visions are to be realized stably.

  Robert Nozick

  People, Vision, May

  Robert Nozick (1974). “Anarchy, state, and utopia”

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• I think that Utopia is a theory of human action.

  Cory Doctorow

  Thinking, Action, Theory

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• The Revolutionary's Utopia, which in appearance represents a complete break with the past, is always modeled on some image of the Lost Paradise, of a legendary Golden Age... All utopias are fed from the source of mythology; the social engineers' blueprints are merely revised editions of the ancient text.

  Arthur Koestler

  Past, Atheism, Age

  Andre Gide, Richard Wright, Ignasio Silone, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler, Louis Fischer (1965). “the god that failed”

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• Most Muslims don't want to live in some Taliban-style utopia, which is what bin Laden and allied groups are offering.

  Peter Bergen

  Offering, Style, Groups

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• I'm not trying to sell pipe dreams to people. I'm not giving them some fake utopia. I'm not telling them it's easy. If it was easy, everyone would do it. But you don't fight the fights you can win, you fight the fights that need fighting. That's the most important part.

  Immortal Technique

  Dream, Fighting, Winning

  Source: readersupportednews.org

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• Americans love marriage too much. We rush into mariage with abandon, expecting a micro-Utopia on earth. We pile all our needs onto it, our expectations, neuroses, and hopes. In fact, we've made marriage into the panda bear of human social institutions: we've loved it to death.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  Expectations, Needs, Pandas

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• You're free to do anything you want with your company. It's more like art. You don't have to follow any norms. It's an expression of how you feel the world should be. When you make a company, that's your little place to make your own little utopia.

  Derek Sivers

  Art, Expression, World

  "Brave Interview Series: Derek Sivers". Interview with Margie Warrell, www.forbes.com. July 1, 2015.

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• Thinking about profound social change, conservatives always expect disaster, while revolutionaries confidently anticipate utopia. Both are wrong.

  Carolyn Heilbrun

  Thinking, Profound, Revolutionary

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• There may well be a few extremists out there somewhere calling for a militant, women-only utopia, but why should this be the definition of 'feminist' when it's already the definition of 'silly'?

  Meghan Daum

  Silly, Feminist, Definitions

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• Holidays are also an opportunity for kids to unlearn every good habit they've learned during the rest of the year. They don't go to school. They get to stay up past their bedtime. They get candy and presents for doing nothing. Childhood utopia.

  Jim Gaffigan

  School, Holiday, Kids

  Jim Gaffigan (2013). “Dad Is Fat”, p.222, Crown Archetype

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• What's interesting about books that take place in the future, even twenty years in the future, is that many of them are black or white: It's either a utopia or it's misery. The real truth is that there's going to be both things in any future, just like there is now.

  Albert Brooks

  Real, Book, Years

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• Genocide is not just a murderous madness; it is, more deeply, a politics that promises a utopia beyond politics - one people, one land, one truth, the end of difference. Since genocide is a form of political utopia, it remains an enduring temptation in any multiethnic and multicultural society in crisis.

  Michael Ignatieff

  Multicultural Society, Land, Differences

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• The system - the American one, at least - is a vast and noble experiment. It has been polestar and exemplar for other nations. But from kindergarten until she graduates from college the girl is treated in it exactly like her brothers. She studies the same subjects, becomes proficient at the same sports. Oh, it is a magnificent lore she learns, education for the mind beyond anything Jane Austen or Saint Theresa or even Mrs. Pankhurst ever dreamed. It is truly Utopian. But Utopia was never meant to exist on this disheveled planet.

  Phyllis McGinley

  Girl, Sports, Education

  Phyllis McGinley (1962). “The province of the heart”

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• Some people consider utopia to be derived from nature. For some people, utopia is the city.

  Joel Sternfeld

  Cities, People

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• Kitsch evokes a future utopia looking back at a past that is selectively (mis)remembered, thereby helping to stabilize the present toward which kitsch is otherwise deeply anatagonistic.

  Theodor Adorno

  Past, Kitsch, Helping

  Theodor Adorno, Richard Leppert, Susan H. Gillespie (2002). “Essays on Music”, p.363, Univ of California Press

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• Despite the miracles of capitalism, it doesn't do well in popularity polls. One of the reasons is that capitalism is always evaluated against the non-existent, non-realizable utopias of socialism or communism. Any earthly system, when compared to a Utopia, will pale in comparison. But for the ordinary person, capitalism, with all of its warts, is superior to any system yet devised to deal with our everyday needs and desires.

  Walter E. Williams

  Miracle, Everyday, Desire

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• Gargantua, at the age of four hundred four score and forty- four years begat his son Pantagruel, from his wife, named Badebec, daughter of the King of the Amaurotes in Utopia, who died in child-birth: because he was marvelously huge and so heavy that he could not come to light without suffocating his mother.

  Francois Rabelais

  Death, Daughter, Mother

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• I have a feeling-as compelling as a religious conviction-that if industry will constantly pass on to the worker and the customer all the savings of labor-saving machinery and invention, rather than siphon them off into the pools of watered securities, it will by that process keep distribution and production in balance and go as far toward Utopia as our poor human natures will go or be driven.

  Samuel B. Pettengill

  Religious, Feelings, Balance

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• Life without utopia is suffocating, for the multitude at least: threatened otherwise with petrifaction, the world must have a new madness.

  Emile M. Cioran

  World, Madness, Multitudes

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• Utopia is the grotesque en rose, the need to associate happiness - that is, the improbable - with becoming, and to coerce an optimistic, aerial vision to the point where it rejoins its own source: the very cynicism it sought to combat. In short, a monstrous fantasy.

  Emile M. Cioran

  Optimistic, Rose, Vision

  "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

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• Utopia's quite another land;
  In her enterprising movements,
  She is England--with improvements

  W. S. Gilbert

  Land, Movement, Improvement

  W. S. Gilbert, Ian C. Bradley (2016). “The Complete Annotated Gilbert and Sullivan”, p.1121, Oxford University Press

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• Historically the belief in heaven and the belief in utopia are like compensatory buckets in a well: when one goes down the other comes up. When the classic religions decayed, communistic agitation rose in Athens (430 B.C.), and revolution began in Rome (133 B.C.); when these movements failed, resurrection faiths succeeded, culminating in Christianity; when, in our eighteenth century, Christian belief weakened, communism reappeared. In this perspective the future of religion is secure.

  Will Durant

  Christian, Rome, Perspective

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