Utopian Quotes - Page 5

• A utopian future for the Internet could be secured if the heavy-duty influencers - and the grassroots influencers tweeting along - can create a new global organization peopled with defenders of Internet freedom.

  Naomi Wolf

  Organization, Internet Freedom, Grassroots

  "Organising against the enemies of internet freedom" by Naomi Wolf, www.theguardian.com. April 27, 2012.

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• I'm not trying to be a solution or create a freer, utopian world. I think my music dreams of it, though.

  Jenny Hval

  Dream, Thinking, Trying

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• The complete destruction of traditional marriage and the nuclear family is the 'revolutionary or utopian' goal of feminism.

  Kate Millett

  Goal, Feminism, Nuclear Families

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• There's no such thing as designing the perfect utopian city. Everything is subject to change. There are no final frontiers.

  Jacque Fresco

  Cities, Perfect, Design

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• When we generate utopian visions and hope to make them happen soon – when we elect Barack Obama and expect all our problems to be solved, and solved quickly, by his presidency – the outcome is both predictable and tragic. That is not the way to engage social change in a democracy. And it is not the way to help democracy itself survive and thrive. Democracy is a non-stop experiment. Each generation must help sustain it, which means being in it day-by-day for the long haul.

  Parker J. Palmer

  Mean, Long, Vision

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• Roddenberry had his own utopian vision about he perfectibility of man, and I never really believed that. And I don’t think the show demonstrates that. I think it is about gunboat diplomacy. In the final analysis, the Enterprise fires. They’re always shooting and bringing civilization, and coming to worlds where they don’t approve of tyrannical enterprises – no pun intended – and they substitute their own quote unquote enlightened version of how society is supposed to work, which is essentially American.

  Nicholas Meyer

  Men, Thinking, Fire

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• 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

  Dream, Sex, Sight

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• There is no likelihood man can ever tap the power of the atom. The glib supposition of utilizing atomic energy when our coal has run out is a completely unscientific Utopian dream, a childish bug-a-boo. Nature has introduced a few fool-proof devices into the great majority of elements that constitute the bulk of the world, and they have no energy to give up in the process of disintegration.

  Robert Andrews Millikan

  Running, Dream, Giving Up

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• A panel at a beautiful annual literary festival in Brazil, held in the almost Utopian coastal town of Parati, found me matched with Fernando Gabeira. This comparison reduced my own limited charisma value to something like zero: Gabeira has excelled at every cultural activity in Brazil.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Love, Beautiful, Zero

  "Terrorists Ain't What They Used To Be" by Christopher Hitchens, www.slate.com. August 15, 2006.

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• There is this fashionable progressive notion that everything is so completely political that the idea we could have some sort of neutral legal process is practically utopian - because we all know that the more money you have, the more rights you can exercise in this society. But I don't think that you deal with income inequality by limiting the First Amendment rights of affluent people. I'd rather see people screw around with the tax code to redistribute wealth a little bit than screw around with the First Amendment.

  Wendy Kaminer

  Exercise, Thinking, People

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• The Anarchists' uncompromising rejection of the State, the subject of Marxian sneers for its "absolutist" and "Utopian" character, makes much better sense in the present era than the Marxist relativist and historical approach. The pacifists also seem to be more realistic than the Marxist both in their understanding of modern war and also in their attempts to do something about it.

  Dwight Macdonald

  War, Character, Rejection

  Dwight Macdonald (194?). “Root is man: progressivism vrs. radicalism”

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• The hermeneutic consciousness, which must be awakened and kept awake, recognized that in the age of science philosophy's claim of superiority has something chimerical and unreal about it. But though the will of man is more than ever intensifying its criticism of what has gone before to the point of becoming utopian or eschatological consciousness, the hermeneutic consciousness seeks to confront that will with something of the truth of remembrance: with what is still and ever again real.

  Hans-Georg Gadamer

  Philosophy, Real, Men

  Hans-Georg Gadamer (2013). “Truth and Method”, p.35, A&C Black

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• Digital technologies are setting down the new grooves of how people live, how we do business, how we do everything--and they're doing it according to the expectations of foolish utopian scenarios. We want free online experiences so badly that we are happy to not be paid for information that comes from us now or ever. That sensibility also implies that the more dominant information becomes in our economy, the less most of us will be worth.

  Jaron Lanier

  Technology, People, Expectations

  Jaron Lanier (2014). “Who Owns the Future?”, p.16, Simon and Schuster

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• Political philosophy is realistically utopian when it extends what are ordinarily thought to be the limits of practicable political possibility and, in so doing, reconciles us to our political and social condition. Our hope for the future of our society rests on the belief that the social world allows a reasonably just Society of Peoples.

  John Rawls

  Philosophy, Political, Our Society

  John Rawls (2001). “The Law of Peoples: With, The Idea of Public Reason Revisited”, p.11, Harvard University Press

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• One theme of what I've been writing has been to get people to understand that "apolitical" means "you lose." It doesn't mean you live a utopian life free of politicians' influence. The destruction of the public domain is the clearest example, but it will only be the first.

  Lawrence Lessig

  Writing, Mean, People

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• The military mind tends to be conservative, realistic and historical. The civilian mind tends to be liberal, idealistic and Utopian. Journalists, obviously, are civilians, and they tend to distrust, and to suspect, the military's motives.

  Mark Riebling

  Military, Historical, Mind

  "Rumsfeld’s Spy Unit". "To the Point" with Warren Olney, NPR, markriebling.blogs.com. October 31, 2002.

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• Wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life. Knowing this gives me hope that human wholeness - mine, yours, ours - need not be a utopian dream, if we can use devastation as a seedbed for new life

  Parker J. Palmer

  Dream, Mean, Knowing

  Parker J. Palmer (2009). “A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life”, p.5, John Wiley & Sons

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• That's not a utopian vision. It is a set of ideas that we think are important to discuss. Those ideas largely have to do with sustainability of cities. The ability of cities to, over time, remain in balance with the resource streams that are available to them, and they have to do with social justice and equity of the fundamental conditions of satisfactory citizenship.

  William J. Mitchell

  Thinking, Cities, Ideas

  Source: bigthink.com

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• Its a heartening fact about the human race that utopian fiction precedes dystopian fiction in the evolution of literature.

  Paul Di Filippo

  Race, Dystopian Fiction, Literature

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• When I wrote 'The Giver,' it contained no so-called 'bad words.' It was set, after all, in a mythical, futuristic, and Utopian society. Not only was there no poverty, divorce, racism, sexism, pollution, or violence in the world of 'The Giver'; there was also careful attention paid to language: to its fluency, precision, and power.

  Lois Lowry

  Divorce, Racism, Attention

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• I somehow hope - naïve though I may be, utopian, possibly - that my music has some kind of calming effect on the universe, that it's somehow beneficial to people.

  John Lydon

  Calming Effect, People, May

  Interview with Jason Heller, www.avclub.com. April 6, 2010.

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• We cannot create blueprint for future society, but it is good to think about that. It is good to have in mind a goal. It is constructive, it is helpful, it is healthy, to think about what future society might be like, because then it guides you somewhat what you are doing today, but only so long as this discussions about future society don't become obstacles to working towards this future society. Otherwise you can spend discussing this utopian possibility versus that utopian possibility, and in the mean time you are not acting in a way that would bring you closer to that.

  Howard Zinn

  Mean, Thinking, Long

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• It would be unjust, and moreover Utopian, for Shakespeare to direct the shoemakers' union. But it would be equally disastrous forthe shoemakers' union to ignore Shakespeare.

  Albert Camus

  Would Be, Unions, Unjust

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt”, p.274, Vintage

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• The utopian male concept which is the premise of male pornography is this--since manhood is established and confirmed over and against the brutalized bodies of women, men need not aggress against each other; in other words, women absorb male aggression so that men are safe from it.

  Andrea Dworkin

  Men, Males, Needs

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• Children and old people and the parents in between should be able to live together, in order to learn how to die with grace, together. And I fear that this is purely utopian fantasy.

  M. F. K. Fisher

  Family, Death, Children

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