Utopian Quotes - page 5
There are pessimists who hold that such a state of affairs is necessarily inherent in human nature; it is those who propound such views that are the enemies of true religion, for they imply thereby that religious teachings are Utopian ideals and unsuited to afford guidance in human affairs.
Albert Einstein
One of our [his] utopian ideas is the desire to overcome the limitations of the substructure, of the earthbound. We have developed this idea in a series of proposals (sky-hooks, [like Lissitzky's paper-architecture design 'Wolkenbügel' (1924)] stadium grandstands, Paris garage].. .It is the task of technology to make sure that all these elementary volumes that produce new relationships and tensions in space will be structurally safe.. .The idea of the conquest of the substructure, the earthbound, can be extended even further and calls for the conquest of gravity as such. It demands floating structures, a physical-dynamic architecture.
El Lissitsky
The dead Lenin who does not know that he is dead thus stands for our own obstinate refusal to renounce the grandiose utopian projects and accept the limitations of our situation: there is no big Other, Lenin was mortal and made errors like all others, so it is time for us to let him die, to put to rest this obscene ghost which haunts our political imaginary, and to approach our problems in a non-ideological and pragmatic way. But there is another sense in which Lenin is still alive: he is alive in so far as he embodies what Badiou calls the 'eternal Idea' of universal emancipation, the immortal striving for justice that no insults and catastrophes manage to kill.
Slavoj Žižek
Property is admitted to have an existence, even in the savage state of nature. The bow, the arrow, and the tomahawk; the hunting and the fishing ground, are species of property, as important to an American savage, as pearls, rubies, and diamonds are to the Mogul, or a Nabob in the East, or the lands, tenements, hereditaments, messuages, gold and silver of the Europeans. And if property is necessary for the support of savage life, it is by no means less so in civil society. The Utopian schemes of levelling, and a community of goods, are as visionary and impracticable, as those which vest all property in the Crown, are arbitrary, despotic, and in our government unconstitutional. Now, what property can the colonists be conceived to have, if their money may be granted away by others, without their consent?
Samuel Adams
The mechanism of the market was asserting itself and clamoring for its completion: human labor had to be made a commodity. Reactionary paternalism had in vain tried to resist this necessity. Out of the horrors of Speenhamland men rushed blindly for the shelter of a utopian market economy.
Karl Polanyi
It's not only corruption that distorts the utopian impulse when it begins to take some specific social shape. The prospect of more freedom stirs anxiety. We want it, but we fear it; it goes against our most deeply ingrained Judeo-Christian definitions of morality and order. At bottom, utopia equals death is a statement about the wages of sin.
Ellen Willis
That we are Utopians is well known. So Utopian are we that we go the length of believing that the Revolution can and ought to assure shelter, food, and clothes to all - an idea extremely displeasing to middle-class citizens, whatever their party color, for they are quite alive to the fact that it is not easy to keep the upper hand of a people whose hunger is satisfied.
Peter Kropotkin
A major goal of investigating how cooperative norms in societal settings have been established is a better understanding of how to promote cooperative norms in international settings. This is not as utopian as it might seem because international norms against slavery and colonialism are already strong, while international norms are partly effective against racial discrimination, chemical warfare, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Because norms sometimes become established surprisingly quickly, there may be some useful cooperative norms that could be hurried along with relatively modest interventions.
Robert Axelrod
For me as a British Conservative, with Edmund Burke the father of Conservatism and first great perceptive critic of the Revolution as my ideological mentor, the events of 1789 represent a perennial illusion in politics. The French Revolution was a Utopian attempt to overthrow a traditional order - one with many imperfections, certainly - in the name of abstract ideas, formulated by vain intellectuals, which lapsed, not by chance but through weakness and wickedness, into purges, mass murder and war. In so many ways it anticipated the still more terrible Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The English tradition of liberty, however, grew over the centuries: its most marked features are continuity, respect for law and a sense of balance, as demonstrated by the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
Margaret Thatcher
