Utopian Quotes - Page 2

• I am convinced that love is the most durable power in the world. It is not an expression of impractical idealism, but of practical realism. Far from being the pious injunction of a Utopian dreamer, love is an absolute necessity for the survival of our civilization. To return hate for hate does nothing but intensify the existence of evil in the universe. Someone must have sense enough and religion enough to cut off the chain of hate and evil, and this can only be done through love.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Peace, Hate, War

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• Home is pretty utopian.

  Scott Adams

  Home

  "'Dilbert' creator on working at home, getting his voice back". CNN.com Interview, www.cnn.com. November 7, 2007.

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• In Utopia, where every man has a right to everything, they all know that if care is taken to keep the public stores full, no private man can want anything; for among them there is no unequal distribution, so that no man is poor, none in necessity; and though no man has anything, yet they are all rich; for what can make a man so rich as to lead a serene and cheerful life, free from anxieties.

  Thomas More

  Taken, Men, Anxiety

  Thomas More (2016). “Utopia”, p.103, BoD – Books on Demand

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• Contrary to the utopian rhetoric of social media enthusiasts, the Internet often makes the jump from deliberation to participation even more difficult, thwarting collective action under the heavy pressure of never-ending internal debate.

  Evgeny Morozov

  Media, Pressure, Action

  "The Digital Dictatorship". www.wsj.com. February 20, 2010.

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• Television screens saturated with commercials promote the utopian and childish idea that all problems have fast, simple, and technological solutions. You must banish from your mind the naive but commonplace notion that commercials are about products. They are about products in the same sense that the story of Jonah is about the anatomy of whales.

  Neil Postman

  Simple, Ideas, Whales

  Neil Postman (2011). “Conscientious Objections: Stirring Up Trouble About Language, Technology and Education”, p.113, Vintage

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• The desire to achieve grand utopian plans often poses a grave threat to freedom.

  Margaret Thatcher

  Desire, Economics, Achieve

  "Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World" by Margaret Thatcher, New York: HarperCollins, (p. 327), 2002.

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• Reality, no matter how utopian, seems to be something people need to frequently take a holiday from.

  Aldous Huxley

  Holiday, Reality, People

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• 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

  Kings, Past, Promise

  George Orwell, A.M. Heath (2003). “Animal Farm and 1984”, p.294, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• (A unified) 'Europe' is the result of plans. It is, in fact, a classic utopian project, a monument to the vanity of intellectuals, a programme whose inevitable destiny is failure: only the scale of the final damage done is in doubt.

  Margaret Thatcher

  Failure, Destiny, Europe

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• What we should grasp, however, from the lessons of European history is that, first, there is nothing necessarily benevolent about programmes of European integration; second, the desire to achieve grand utopian plans often poses a grave threat to freedom; and third, European unity has been tried before, and the outcome was far from happy.

  Margaret Thatcher

  Strong Women, Freedom, Europe

  Margaret Thatcher (2017). “On Europe”, p.1941, HarperCollins UK

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• To be hopeful in bad times is based on the fact that human history is not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand Utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

  Howard Zinn

  Hope, Kindness, Future

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• When I stand at the top of the Champs-Elysées, with its chestnut trees in flower, its undulations of shining cars, its white spaciousness, I feel as if I were biting into a utopian fruit, something velvety and lustrous and rich and vivid.

  Anais Nin

  Flower, Paris, White

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• There cannot be a nation of millionaires, and there never has been a nation of Utopian comrades; but there have been any number of nations of tolerably contented peasants.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Numbers, Peasants, Millionaire

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• Architecture is a hazardous mixture of omnipotence and impotence. It is by definition a c h a o t i c a d v e n t u r e... In other words, the utopian enterprise.

  Rem Koolhaas

  Omnipotence, Mixtures, Definitions

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• There's no way to design a society that's optimal or utopian.  It's better than the one that was.  Systems always undergo change.

  Jacque Fresco

  Design, Way, Optimal

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• The planet Mars -- crimson and bright, filling our telescopes with vague intimations of almost-familiar landforms -- has long formed a celestial tabula rasa on which we have inscribed our planeto-logical theories, utopian fantasies, and fears of alien invasion or ecological ruin.

  David Grinspoon

  Long, Mars, Invasion

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• I know it's way too Utopian to think we will all ever just hugand love each other- but proactively dealing with hate could be as important to the future as clean water.

  Bobby Sager

  Hate, Thinking, Water

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• What interests me is to paint the kind of antisensitivity that impregnates modern civilization. I think art since Cezanne has become extremely romantic and unrealistic, feeding on art. It is Utopian. It has less and less to do with the world. It looks inward - neo-Zen and all that. Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn't look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself.

  Roy Lichtenstein

  Art, Thinking, Civilization

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• The human species was too fond of lying, cheating, envy, ignorance, self-pity, self-righteousness, and utopian visions that always led to mass murder-but until and if it destroyed itself, it harbored the potential to become nobler, to take responsibility for its actions, to live and let live, and to earn the stewardship of the earth.

  Dean Koontz

  Cheating, Lying, Ignorance

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• It is singular to look round upon a country where the dreams of sages, smiled at as utopian, seem distinctly realized, a people voluntarily submitting to laws of their own imposing, with arms in their hands respecting the voice of a government which their breath created and which their breath could in a moment destroy!

  Frances Wright

  Dream, Country, Government

  Frances Wright (1821). “Views of society and manners in America: in a series of letters from that country to a friend in England, during the years 1818, 1819, and 1820”, p.362

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• I think attempting to make art is a utopian process in itself, definitely. Nothing I do is ever equal to the ideas in my head. You do the best you can, you do it with patience and love, and then you give up. The moment you give up is when you know the book is done.

  Lauren Groff

  Art, Giving Up, Book

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• Passion for equality blinds the utopian to the fact that society, as a whole, is based on inequality of men in two respects: the inventor, the innovator, the exceptional man creates something new and insures continuous progress; the others emulate his work or merely improve their own lot by benefiting from his creativity.

  Thomas Steven Molnar

  Passion, Creativity, Men

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• We have to have a more realistic foreign policy and not a utopian one where we say, oh, we're going to spread freedom and democracy, and everybody in the Middle East is going to love us. They are not going to love us.

  Rand Paul

  Democracy, Middle East, Realistic

  Source: cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com

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• The thought was, 'We're going to go to California, where the soil is black and ten feet deep, and there are no rocks, and there's gold in the hills.' The West becomes the surface onto which people project their fantasies, where once the future had been the place they projected their fantasies. So it's not just the war that ends the utopian communities, but what follows.

  Christine Jennings

  War, Rocks, California

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Because the utopian's worldview was framed around moving toward this perfected future, it helped stimulate the private exertions that add up to social progress. Progress is work. People need to build things and sacrifice and have a harder life for things to get better. On its own, I don't think even the most brilliant critique stimulates that kind of effort as well as an appealing vision of the future.

  Christine Jennings

  Moving, Sacrifice, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

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