Utopia Quotes

An acre in Middlesex is better than a principality in Utopia. (Thomas Babington Macaulay)
We are at heart so profoundly anarchistic that the only form of state we can imagine living in is Utopian; and so cynical that the only Utopia we can believe in is authoritarian. View quote
Lionel Trilling
Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That's my utopia. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison. View quote
Nathaniel Hawthorne
There is one expanding horror in American life. It is that our long odyssey toward liberty, democracy and freedom-for-all may be achieved in such a way that utopia remains forever closed, and we live in freedom and hell, debased of style, not individual from one another, void of courage, our fear rationalized away. View quote
Norman Mailer
To know oneself is to disbelieve utopia. View quote
Michael Novak
Cycle tracks will abound in Utopia. View quote
H. G. Wells
In 1917 European history, in the old sense, came to an end. World history began. It was the year of Lenin and Woodrow Wilson, both of whom repudiated the traditional standards of political behaviour. Both preached Utopia, Heaven on Earth. It was the moment of birth for our contemporary world. View quote
A. J. P. Taylor
It is true that I am not one of those who laugh at utopias. The utopia of today can become the reality of tomorrow. Utopias are conceived by optimistic logic which regards constant social and political progress as the ultimate goal of human endeavor; pessimism would plunge a hopeless mankind into a fresh cataclysm. View quote
Charles Albert Gobat
No Utopia is Utopia for everyone. View quote
Karen Joy Fowler
All my writing is about the recognition that there is no single reality. But the beauty of it is that you nevertheless go on, walking towards utopia, which may not exist, on a bridge which might end before you reach the other side. (Marguerite Young)
I would say my theme has always been paradise lost, always the lost cause, the lost leader, the lost utopia. View quote
Marguerite Young
The president's dream of a worldwide liberal utopia is going to undermine the security of the United States. View quote
Peter T. King
Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment.... Humanity is in 'final exam' as to whether or not it qualifies for continuance in Universe. View quote
Buckminster Fuller
The World has become too dangerous for anything less than Utopia. View quote
Buckminster Fuller
None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace. View quote
Theodor Adorno
Jazz is the false liquidation of art - instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture. View quote
Theodor Adorno
Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism. View quote
Emil Cioran
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. View quote
Robert Nozick
A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. View quote
Oscar Wilde
Our Being is Becoming, not stasis. Our Science is Utopia, our Reality is Eros, our Desire is Revolution. (Murray Bookchin)
Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache. They wanted to produce a perfect society by an endless continuation of something that had only been valuable because it was temporary. The wider course would be to say that there are certain lines along which humanity must move, the grand strategy is mapped out, but detailed prophecy is not our business. Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness. View quote
George Orwell
The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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. View quote
Will Durant
Without effort and change, human life cannot remain good. It is not a finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive and active. View quote
Bertrand Russell