Charles Albert Gobat Quotes

It's a heartening fact about the human race that utopian fiction precedes dystopian fiction in the evolution of literature.

Progress is the realization of utopia.

Human progress has never been shaped by commentators, complainers or cynics.

For other nations, utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is just beyond the horizon.

Man, in the collective sense, is the hero of science. Man, in the collective sense, is the hero of Earth.

I'm very much an optimist. I don't think I could do my work if I didn't believe there was some kind of hope for humanity.

It's easy to imagine ways the future can be ugly and depressing. It's harder, but more worthwhile, to imagine plausible ways we can make it better.

The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.

STAR TREK is a show that had a vision about a future that was positive.

Until politics are a branch of science we shall do well to regard political and social reforms as experiments rather than short-cuts to the millennium.

The old always think the world is getting worse; it is for the young, equipped with historical facts, to point out that, compared with 1509, or even 1939, life in 2009 is sweet as honey.

If men were basically evil, who would bother to improve the world instead of giving it up as a bad job at the outset?

Chile isn't the biggest, richest or most powerful country in the world, but we should dedicate ourselves to transforming it into the best country in the world. We don't have a single minute to lose.

We like to believe that, in our lifetime, the human condition is improving.

We are living in a Golden Age, the most gilded Golden Age of human history—not only of past history, but of future history.

Machines and their development provide the greatest opportunity in the whole history of mankind to improve the lot of the individual human being.

Therein lies the greatness of man. Fear is never allowed to dominate that desire for greater knowledge and as long as mankind retains that spirit we will move forward.

… utopianism is probably a necessary social device for generating the superhuman efforts without which no major revolution is achieved.

'Star Trek' speaks to some basic human needs: that there is a tomorrow - it's not all going to be over with a big flash and a bomb; that the human race is improving; that we have things to be proud of as humans.

The promise of individual and collective emancipation implicit in the notion of progress appears to be broken.

I have no sympathy for debunking human achievements that, in the end, gave ordinary people liberty.

I think, with TG, in our own ways, we have been committed to the idea of evolution on some level and change on some level - that human behaviour may not be changeable, but one has to try and be optimistic and work towards content that might signify change.

That's what 'Star Trek' was: We don't know how to make an ideal society, but we're going to portray that, and then we're going to work backward. I think that's why science fiction - despite the dystopian parts - comes out of this super ideal that, eventually, we will get to some better place where we actually live up to our ideals.

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.

Utopia is on the horizon. I move two steps closer; it moves two steps further away. I walk another ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps further away. As much as I may walk, I'll never reach it. So what's the point of utopia? The point is this: to keep walking.