Utopian Quotes - page 3
It makes no sense to regard the right of suffrage as a utopian product of fantasy, cut loose from social reality. And it is for this reason that it is not a serious instrument of the proletarian dictatorship. It is an anachronism, an anticipation of the juridical situation which is proper on the basis of an already completed socialist economy, but is not in the transition period of the proletarian dictatorship.
Rosa Luxemburg
It may be said, therefore, that the military opinion of the world is opposed to those people who cry 'Democratize the army!' and it must be remembered that an army is not a field upon which persons with Utopian ideas may exercise their political theories, but a weapon for the defence of the State.
Winston Churchill
Upheaval after upheaval has reminded up that modern man is traveling along the road called hate, in a journey that will bring us to destruction and damnation. Far from being the pious injunction of a Utopian dreamer, the command to love one's enemy is an absolute necessity for our survival. Love even for enemies is the key to the solution of the problems of our world.
Martin Luther King Jr.
We are not wrong, we are not wrong in what we are doing. If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. And if we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong. If we are wrong, Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer that never came down to Earth. If we are wrong, justice is a lie, love has no meaning. And we are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until "justice runs down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream."
Martin Luther King Jr.
The entertainment industry makes this [phantasmagoria of distraction] easier by elevating the person to the level of the commodity. He surrenders to its manipulations while enjoying his alienation from himself and others. The enthronement of the commodity, with its lustre of distraction...is consistent with the split between utopian and cynical elements.
Wilson Harris
Those who would trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us that they have a utopian solution of peace without victory. They call their policy "accommodation." And they say if we only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he will forget his evil ways and learn to love us. All who oppose them are indicted as warmongers.
Ronald Reagan
President Obama is a utopian at heart. He wants to improve the lives of the downtrodden, which is a good thing. But, he doesn't understand that damaging the free marketplace in pursuit of 'social justice' will eventually harm those whom he wants to help. The nation's crushing debt is a tsunami brewing off shore.
Bill O'Reilly
What we are expecting, after 2012, is a one hundred more times, more harmonious, Utopian world, where things like, time travel, levitation, instant telepathy, instant healing, telekinesis are as common and as everyday, as breathing. And I look forward to that time ...I see a very, very positive future coming.
David Wilcock
The utopian element in politics lies in the ability to disentangle the image of possible human association from forms of life that make people's material and moral ability depend on their acceptance of predetermined hierarchical and communal divisions. The struggle of this visionary politics is to deny the identification of society with a limited repertory of social forms. Such a repertory imprisons all experiments in practical collaboration, in self-expression and reconciliation, within a determinate scheme of ranks and divisions, of authoritative ideals, and of accepted contexts for the realization of these ideals.
Roberto Mangabeira Unger
If I propose something distant, you may sayː interesting, but utopian. If I propose something close, you may answerː feasible but trivial. In contemporary efforts to think and talk programmatically, all proposals are made to seem either utopian or trivial. We have lost confidence in our ability to imagine structural change in society, and fall back upon a surrogate standardː a proposal is realistic if it approaches what already exists. It is easy to be a realist if you accept everything.
Roberto Mangabeira Unger
Utopia is a spatial matter that might be thought to know potential change in fortunes in so spatialized a culture as the postmodern; but if this last is a dehistoricized and dehistorizing as I some times claim here, the synaptic chain that might lead the Utopian impulse to expression becomes harder to localize. Utopian representations knew an extraordinarily revival in the 1960's; if postmodernism is the substitute for the sixties and the compensation for their political failure, the question of Utopia would seem to be a crucial test of what is left of our capacity to imagine change at all.
Fredric Jameson
You need a prince to make a town in an intellectual sense. Developers want to make money. If they cared about architecture, they'd become architects. I've had so many projects that never came off because they had no sponsor, and not because they were utopian. I just want to build a town that's normal.
Leon Krier
If you can repair your future child's myopia with preemptive genetic tinkering, you might also want to increase her I.Q. by a few dozen points. Will it lead to a world as utopian as Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average? Of course not. It will just add genetic manipulation of embryos and child cloning to the means by which affluent, fussy people try to distance themselves from bad luck, disappointment, menial work, death, and poor people.
David Quammen
The designs of the paper euros, introduced in 2002, proclaim a utopian aspiration. Gone are the colorful bills of particular nations, featuring pictures of national heroes of statecraft, culture and the arts, pictures celebrating unique national narratives. With the euro, 16 nations have said goodbye to all that.
George Will
