Arthur C. Clarke Quotes

Utopias rest on the fallacy that perfection is a legitimate goal of human existence.

I think that Utopia is a theory of human action.

Let's build Paradise again.

I guess we'd be living in a boring, perfect world if everybody wished everybody else well.

There's no perfect place, there's no wonderful utopia.

Utopia is that which is in contradiction with reality.

Utopias are boring. Distopias on the other hand, are interesting.

Utopia is in the moment. Not in some future time, some other place, but in the here and now, or else it is nowhere.

Happiness is the chief material also in the construction of Utopias.

I abhor the idea of a perfect world. It would bore me to tears.

Life without utopia is suffocating, for the multitude at least: threatened otherwise with petrifaction, the world must have a new madness.

Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.

Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program… I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from.

Wheresoever she was, there was Eden.

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.

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.

Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies.

Without the Utopians of other times, men would still live in caves, miserable and naked. It was Utopians who traced the lines of the first City.....Out of generous dreams come beneficial realities. Utopia is the principle of all progress, and the essay into a better future.

. . . the newspapers of Utopia, he had long ago decided, would be terribly dull.

Utopia lies at the horizon. When I draw nearer by two steps, it retreats two steps. If I proceed ten steps forward, it swiftly slips ten steps ahead. No matter how far I go, I can never reach it. What, then, is the purpose of utopia? It is to cause us to advance.

We cannot set up, out of our heads, something we regard as an ideal society.

Political utopias are a form of nostalgia for an imagined past projected onto the future as a wish.

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.

The world is imperfect, and young people are always trying to perfect it and they always fail - which is a good thing. Who'd want to live in a perfect world?