Utopianism Quotes

“Where utopianism is advanced through gradualism rather than revolution, albeit steady and persistent as in democratic societies, it can deceive and disarm an unsuspecting population, which is largely content and passive. It is sold as reforming and improving the existing society's imperfections and weaknesses without imperiling its basic nature. Under these conditions, it is mostly ignored, dismissed, or tolerated by much of the citizenry and celebrated by some. Transformation is deemed innocuous, well-intentioned, and perhaps constructive but not a dangerous trespass on fundamental liberties.”
― Mark R. Levin, Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America

“Utopianism also finds a receptive audience among the society's disenchanted, disaffected, dissatisfied, and maladjusted who are unwilling or unable to assume responsibility for their own real or perceived conditions but instead blame their surroundings, 'the system,' and others. They are lured by the false hopes and promises of utopian transformation and the criticisms of the existing society, to which their connection is tentative or nonexistent. Improving the malcontent's lot becomes linked to the utopian cause. Moreover, disparaging and diminishing the successful and accomplished becomes an essential tactic. No one should be better than anyone else, regardless of the merits or values of his contributions. By exploiting human frailties, frustrations, jealousies, and inequities, a sense of meaning and self-worth is created in the malcontent's otherwise unhappy and directionless life. Simply put, equality in misery -- that is, equality of result or conformity -- is advanced as a just, fair, and virtuous undertaking. Liberty, therefore, is inherently immoral, except where it avails equality.”
― Mark R. Levin, Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America

“Utopianism also attempts to shape and dominate the individual by doing two things at once: it strips the individual of his uniqueness, making him indistinguishable from the multitudes that form what is commonly referred to as 'the masses,' but it simultaneously assigns him a group identity based on race, ethnicity, age, gender, income, etc., to highlight differences within the masses.”
― Mark R. Levin, Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America

“Utopianism's equality is intolerant of diversity, uniqueness, debate, etc., for utopianism's purpose requires a singular focus. There can be no competing voices or causes slowing or obstructing society's long and righteous march. Utopianism relies on deceit, propaganda, dependence, intimidation, and force. In its more aggressive state, as the malignancy of the enterprise becomes more painful and its impossibility more obvious, it incites violence inasmuch as avenues for free expression and civil dissent are cut off. Violence becomes the individual's primary recourse and the state's primary response. Ultimately, the only way out is the state's termination.”
― Mark R. Levin, Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America

“The problem of utopia is that it can only be approached across a sea of blood, and you never arrive.”
― Peter Hitchens

“It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.”
― Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

“The Marauders are a socialist utopia. We have no leaders.”
― MsKingBean89, All the Young Dudes

“People, imperfect and corruptible are society's building blocks. Political theories evading this reality are a catastrophe in waiting.”
― A.E. Samaan

“One of the most common sense things about real world progress is that progressivism must never steer into its own dogmatism. One can be sure, at least every so often, that there eventually comes a point either to stop, to turn around, or to make a turn; lest a wall is pummeled, a cliff is tumbled, or a mere cycle is tunneled forever.”
― Criss Jami

“Imagine a nation comprised of California Hawaii Oregon and Washington. Imagine a country that is the most advanced in science and technology, and easily the most prosporous nation in the world. A nation saddled with no debt. A nation possessing all western seaports with regard to economic trade. So imagine a nation of great wealth and prosperity that is dedicated to a higher way for humanity. A way of peace for all humans, planetary protection and healing, advancement of science and technology. That is what we "utopian" types could easily visualize... perhaps we would call it Lemuria.....”
― Leland Lewis, Angel Stories. Angelic Tales of the Universe. Tales 7 through 12

“Of course, the Shtrakenzer bride, though perfect, was not suitable; Mrs. Shpilman knew that. Long before the maid came to say that nobody could find Mendel, that he had disappeared sometime in the course of the night, Mrs. Shilman has known that no degree of accomplishment, beauty, or fire in a girl would ever suit her son. But there was always a shortfall, wasn’t there? Between the match that the Holy One, blessed be He, envisioned and the reality of the situation under the chuppah. Between commandment and observance, heaven and earth, husband and wife, Zion and Jew.”
― Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union

“The Bible angers and frustrates those who believe that the pursuit of a perfect society justifies the quest for absolute power.”
― Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith

“Stalin and Kim made human idols of themselves because they believed, as utopian idealists always do, in the ultimate goodness of themselves and the unchallengeable rightness of their decisions. There was no higher power, and so there could be no higher law. If people disagreed with them, it was because those people were in some way defective--insane, malignant, or mercenary. The rulers could not tolerate actual religion, because they could not tolerate any rival authority or any rival source or judge of goodness, gratitude, and justice.”
― Peter Hitchens

“Utopia retains throughout its long history the basic form of the narrative of a journey... First comes the picture of a happy people in a beautiful and well-ordered setting; then comes the lecture on how it all came about, how it works, and, by implication, how it might be made to work in the traveller's own society.”
― Krishan Kumar, Utopianism

“Utopia retains throughout its long history the basic form of the narrative of a journey. The traveler in space or time is an explorer who happens upon utopia. He (or, more recently, she) meets its people, usually at first its ordinary people, observes them at work and play, sees their dwellings and their cities... The traveler is, as are we, the more prepared to accept the validity and desirability of the general principles for having seen with his own eyes its effects in the daily life of its inhabitants.”
― Krishan Kumar, Utopianism

“Psychology at best tells us how things are, not how they are supposed to be! There is no utopic science.”
― zal

“There were hundreds of worlds like it, most of them littered with the usual Elder Culture ruins, the usual secrets waiting to be unlocked. This one had been colonised by an atechnic cult sixty years ago. Maybe they were living the life of pastoral utopianism they’d planned; maybe they had descended into savagery and were roasting and eating prisoners of war captured in tribal wars fought with stone-tipped spears. No one knew nor cared.”
― Paul McAuley, Into Everywhere

“All political ideals, that of making the people happy is perhaps the most dangerous one. It leads invariably to the attempt to impose our scale of ‘higher’ values upon others, in order to make them realize what seems to us of greatest importance for their happiness; in order, as it were, to save their souls. It leads to Utopianism and Romanticism. We all feel certain that everybody would be happy in the beautiful, the perfect community of our dreams.”
― Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies

“Romantic utopianism is the opiate of the leftists.”
― Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage

“#MOFA = Make Orwell Fiction Again”
― A.E. Samaan

“Man's Utopian dreams get circumvented through compromise and disappointment into a tolerable reality.”
― Stewart Stafford

“It was assumed that entire societies could be transformed and changed in a relatively short span of time if only enough people were prepared to accept and follow the principles and priorities set by a vanguard in possession of those timeless standards. The only things that remained to be done, [Isaiah] Berlin wryly noted, was to eliminate all obstacles (human and material) to progress before the process of building the radiant future could begin in earnest. This could be done in one step through violence or gradually through persuasion, threats, reeducation, disenfranchisement, dispossession of property, relocation, coercion, blackmail, denunciation, and, if necessary, terror.”
― Aurelian Craiutu, Faces of Moderation: The Art of Balance in an Age of Extremes

“As [Isaiah] Berlin wrote to George Kennan in 1951, 'What we violently reject is ... the very idea that there are circumstances in which one has a right to get at, and shape the characters and souls of other men for purposes which these men, if they realized what we were doing, might reject.' The respect for individual liberty goes hand in hand with the recognition of human dignity as a fundamental principle and is incompatible with treating human beings as sheer material to be conditioned and shaped at will.”
― Aurelian Craiutu, Faces of Moderation: The Art of Balance in an Age of Extremes

“The search for a policy to overcome original sin is not a coherent political project.”
― Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left

“A virulent form of utopianism has indeed afflicted the modern age, but its name is not Marxism. It is the crazed motion that a single global system known as the free market can impose itself on the most diverse cultures and economies and cure all their ills. The purveyors of this totalitarian fantasy are not to be found hiding scar-faced and sinisterly soft-spoken in underground bunkers like James Bond villains. They are to be seen dining at upmarket Washington restaurants and strolling on Sussex estates.”
― Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

“Better a mess that exists than a perfect, utopian, non-existent reality that only lives in somebody's dream and waits to become a reality some unknown day.”
― Dr. Lucas D. Shallua

“The environmentalist notion about a “Mother Earth” or “delicate balance in nature” is no more sophisticated or based on empirical evidence than is a belief in the “Garden of Eden”. All evidence points to a violently chaotic universe, where our “Mother Earth” is nothing buy a piece of phlegm spat out and being whirled around by our Sun. We are at the mercy of whatever catastrophe is unleashed upon our little piece of Sun hocker, and by no means living in some utopian conception of Eden.”
― A.E. Samaan

“What then, is "Western Maoism"--whitch captured a number of the European Left in the 1960s and 1970s--in light of the clarification outlined here? It is a curious amalgam of various bits and pieces of Mao's thought, from Mao Zedong Thought and the Maoism of the Cultural Revolution, and then reframed in terms of utopian tendencies inherent in Western Marxism.”
― Roland Theodore Boer

“Ideal circumstance is the Paradise of Fools.”
― Alexander B. Grosart Joshuah Sylvester, The Complete Works of Joshuah Sylvester. Two Volumes

“Our dream of heaven cannot be realized on earth. Once we begin to rely upon our reason, and to use our powers of criticism, once we feel the call of personal responsibilities, and with it, the responsibility of helping to advance knowledge, we cannot return to a state of implicit submission to tribal magic. For those who have eaten from the tree of knowledge, paradise is lost. The more we try to return to tribal heroism, the more surely do we arrive at the Inquisition, at the Secret Police, and at a romanticized gangsterism. Beginning with the suppression of reason and truth, we must end with the most brutal and violent destruction of all that is human. There is no return to a harmonious state of nature. If we turn back, then we must go the whole way, we must return to the beasts.

It is an issue which we must face squarely, hard though it may be for us to do so. If we dream of a return to our childhood, if we are tempted to rely on others and so be happy, if we turn back from the task of carrying our cross, the cross of humaneness, of reason, of responsibility, if we lose courage and flinch from the strain, then we must try to fortify ourselves with a clear understanding of the simple decision before us. We can return to the beasts. But if we wish to remain human, then there is only one way, the way into the open society. We must go on into the unknown, courageously, using what reason we have, to plan for security and freedom.”
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies