Utopian Quotes - Page 5

• The thing that had fueled these utopian communities was a literal belief, and not just a general sense of optimism, that the earth was about to become a paradise. That idea cannot hold water after the war.

  Christine Jennings

  War, Ideas, Water

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The whole notion that you can equalize opportunity in things that
  matter is utopian.

  Thomas Sowell

  Opportunity, Matter, Notion

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• What begins as a Utopian vision, always - always - ends in bloodshed. Because you have to force a utopia on a free people. Free people want to pursue their own happiness, but a one-size-fits-all approach requires herding the free, against their will, into the state's idea of what's right. Then it's not utopia.

  Greg Gutfeld

  Ideas, People, Vision

  Greg Gutfeld (2012). “The Joy of Hate: How to Triumph over Whiners in the Age of Phony Outrage”, p.140, Crown Forum

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• Democracy begins in human conversation. A democratic conversation does not require elaborate rules of procedure or utopian notions of perfect consensus. What it does require is a spirit of mutual respect-people conversing critically with one another in an atmosphere of honesty and shared regard.

  William Greider

  Honesty, People, Perfect

  William Greider (1992). “Who will tell the people: the betrayal of American democracy”

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• 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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• Utopian fiction is really boring. I had to read a lot of it, and it's not that much fun. But they're fascinating to me as historical documents. Cabet [Icaria's founder and author of the utopian novel, Travels in Icaria], is writing in the 1830s, and his idea of the perfect society reveals a lot about his time. But his book is uniquely bad.

  Christine Jennings

  Fun, Book, Writing

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Fiction is always a utopian task, in that there's an ideal you hold in your head as you write which inevitably fails in the moment of creation, in the insufficiency of words to convey meaning, or in the way the work is completed in the reader's head.

  Lauren Groff

  Writing, Tasks, Fiction

  Interview with Jason Skipper, therumpus.net. August 24, 2012.

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• The fatal flaw of most utopian visions is that they're fundamentally static, and that's not a comfortable place for humans to live. Fourier was very good at imagining a utopia that is constantly changing and very busy, but a vision of paradise that would have been most tantalizing to an underfed overworked factory worker in 1840 doesn't have much appeal in fiction because it's not a story.

  Christine Jennings

  Vision, Fiction, Stories

  Source: therumpus.net

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• One thing that struck me about going to those tech conferences was all the enthusiasm for free culture, and remixing, and social media, but people's greatest ambition was to be sponsored by Chipotle or something equivalent to that. It was this weird mix of collaborative, utopian claims and this total acquiescence to commercial imperatives.

  Astra Taylor

  Ambition, Media, People

  Source: therumpus.net

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• There's a book of interviews with John Cage by Joan Retallack called Musicage that was finished the summer that he died, in 1992. And in one of the last interviews, he was very excited to talk about nanotechnology. There's real technophilia from him, a kind of utopian embrace of the idea that nanotechnology will free people up to do what they really want to do.

  David Grubbs

  Summer, Real, Book

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• So there's that change of general consciousness, and then there's this boom after the war, this expansion into the West. It was like the 1950s. The American economy was pumping at top speed. The kinds of people who would move into these communities and organize their lives around a utopian dream now had dreams about the West.

  Christine Jennings

  Dream, War, Moving

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The vision shared by both [French utopian] Charles Fourier and Robert Owen was for an entire town to fit into one structure. Owen's design for what he called a "parallelogram" was essentially to have a whole city in one building, laid out around a huge quadrangle. Fourier's scheme was to build a massive Versailles-like structure that he called a "phalanstery." In both cases they had these architectural dreams that we now recognize as pretty unappealing.

  Christine Jennings

  Dream, Cities, Design

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The dreams get anchored in aged wisdom not some utopian fantasy.

  Shane Claiborne

  Dream, Fantasy

  "Plotting goodness together: An interview with Shane Claiborne". Interview with Jonathan Merritt, religionnews.com. May 22, 2013.

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• I'm not an activist by nature. I am suspicious of Utopian thinking and equally suspicious of its alternate.

  Margaret Atwood

  Thinking, Activist, Suspicious

  "Unscripted: Margaret Atwood Interview By Paul D. Miller". Interview with Paul D. Miller, www.marandapleasantmedia.com.

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• Take cyberspace as an example. We had this wonderful utopian vision of a new home for the mind. What we've reaped isn't cyberspace. It's cyberbia. It's this vast, bland wasteland of vulgar people and trivial ideas and pictures of half-naked starlets. But despite all the uncertainty, has there ever been a more fascinating moment to be alive?

  Paul Saffo

  Home, Ideas, People

  Source: www.sfgate.com

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• There was a period when the utopian scenario was almost true - when we felt that you could do almost anything in a club, as long as it was any good. There was no rigid expectation from the audience as to how it had to be delivered. But this didn't last very long. It was almost palpable, the decline of this in the new millennium.

  Thomas Koner

  Long, Expectations, Audience

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• Education as a democratic project always presupposes a vision of the future in its introduction to, preparation for, and legitimation of particular forms of social life. It is utopian in its goal of expanding and deepening the ideological and material conditions that make a democracy possible. As a moral and political practice, education produces the modes of literacy, critique, sense of social responsibility, and civic courage necessary to imbue young people with the knowledge and skills needed to enable them to be engaged critical citizens willing to fight for a sustainable and just society.

  Henry Giroux

  Responsibility, Fighting, People

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• I feel as if dystopian and utopian representations are historically the most effective way of criticizing modern society. You know, because you don't have to be factually accurate. You can kind of construct some awesome strawman arguments in your fictional world.

  Owen Pallett

  World, Kind, Argument

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Design is interesting because it's utopian. Art is often a jaundiced commentary on contemporary life. Design is always about the future; it's always about something great and new that's come out that will make the future brighter. It has this weird 18th - century positivism about it.

  Momus

  Art, Interesting, Design

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• How do we get utopian thinking in a dystopian world? These days we aren't talking to each other - we're screaming and trying to hit each other over the head with rocks and sticks. A primitive fury has been unleashed by a president who has no culture, who cannot read, and who wants to determine power and aggression.

  Carolee Schneemann

  Thinking, Trying, President

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Michel Aflaq - is bad poetry wrapped in the guise of utopian politics, or great poetry wrapped in the guise of horrible politics.

  Elliott Colla

  Horrible, Great Poetry, Great Poet

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Detroit is a fascinating place, because things are so bad there that the dystopia has almost become utopian. People know they can't rely on the state, that public infrastructure is broken, and they've taken their own measures. People are growing their own food and selling their produce to local stores and restaurants. It's certainly not a fix-all; Detroit's problems are too deep-rooted for quick-fix solutions. But it's a hopeful sign. Detroiters are crafting their own solutions rather than being passive in the face of the city's and state's actions and inactions.

  Sasha Abramsky

  Taken, People, Broken

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• I'm an anxious person in general, but something about being pregnant and awaiting the release of my first book, The Monsters Of Templeton, made me into an insane anxious person. I didn't sleep at night. I ended up sleeping all day. In a strange way I felt like the world was going to end. I found myself so deeply depressed at times that I started to read about happiness, and that took me into books about idealism and utopianism. Reading books about people who tried to build utopian societies of different kinds gave me a kind of lift.

  Lauren Groff

  Book, Reading, Sleep

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• Reading about utopianism, and eventually creating characters with their own utopian ambitions, was the way I learned to live with being a pregnant person, to stave off the sense of incipient disaster. You're bringing a person into this overcrowded world, knowing they're one day going to die and there's nothing you can do about it.

  Lauren Groff

  Reading, Ambition, Character

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• I'm not an activist by nature. I am suspicious of Utopian thinking and equally suspicious of its alternate. I would prefer to stay in the Writing Burrow and play with my imaginary friends and enemies. I get sucked into these things.

  Margaret Atwood

  Writing, Thinking, Play

  "Unscripted: Margaret Atwood Interview". Interview With Paul D. Miller, www.marandapleasantmedia.com.

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