“Eager souls, mystics and revolutionaries, may propose to refashion the world in accordance with their dreams; but evil remains, and so long as it lurks in the secret places of the heart, utopia is only the shadow of a dream”
Nathaniel Hawthorne

"Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power."
Aldous Huxley

"In the next few years the struggle will not be between utopia and reality, but between different utopias, each trying to impose itself on reality ... we can no longer hope to save everything, but ... we can at least try to save lives, so that some kind of future, if perhaps not the ideal one, will remain possible."
Albert Camus, Between Hell and Reason

"In Utopia, where every man has a right to everything, they all know that if care is taken to keep the public stores full, no private man can want anything; for among them there is no unequal distribution, so that no man is poor, none in necessity; and though no man has anything, yet they are all rich; for what can make a man so rich as to lead a serene and cheerful life, free from anxieties."
Thomas More, Utopia

"I shall speak of how melancholy and utopia preclude one another. How they fertilize one another... of the revulsion that follows one insight and precedes the next... of superabundance and surfeit. Of stasis in progress. And of myself, for whom melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin."
Gunther Grass

“If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there'd be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.”
Nadine Gordimer

"Some who are too scrupulous to steal your possessions nevertheless see no wrong in tampering with your thoughts."
Kahlil Gibran

"All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in."
Toni Morrison

"Utopias are presented for our inspection as a critique of the human state. If they are to be treated as anything but trivial exercises of the imagination. I suggest there is a simple test we can apply. We must forget the whole paraphernalia of social description, demonstration, expostulation, approbation, condemnation. We have to say to ourselves, How would I myself live in this proposed society? How long would it be before I went stark staring mad?"
William Golding

"Utopia is that which is in contradiction with reality."
Albert Camus, Between Hell and Reason

"To know oneself is to disbelieve utopia."
Michael Novak

"A race of altruists is necessarily a race of slaves. A race
of free men is necessarily a race of egoists."
Max Stirner

"Utopia would seem to offer the spectacle of one of those rare phenomena whose concept is indistinguishable from its reality, whose ontology coincides with its representation."
Fredric Jameson

“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.”
Oscar Wilde

"Utopians...consider individual freedom as the stumbling block on which the grandiose idea of mankind’s totalization may flounder."
Thomas Molnar

"There can be no peace on earth as long as there is war in love."
Dieter Duhm

“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.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne

"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."
Sir Winston Churchill

"Abandon all hopes of utopia - there are people involved."
Claton Cramer

“Not in Utopia, -- subterranean fields, --
Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!
But in the very world, which is the world
Of all of us, -- the place where in the end
We find our happiness, or not at all!”
Willam Wordsworth

"Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labeled Utopian."
Emma Goldman

"The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future"
Frank Herbert (Dune)

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The End of Suffering
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A Brief History of Paradise
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Quora Answers (2015-23)
Quotations about Happiness
MDMA: Utopian Pharmacology?
A Defence of Paradise Engineering
Quotations about Suffering and its Abolition