societal perfection Quotes

The attempt to make heaven on earth invariably produces hell.

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.

No Utopia is Utopia for everyone

I think that Utopia is a theory of human action.

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

Utopias now appear much more realizable than one used to think. We are now faced with a different new worry: How to prevent their realization.

Children will still die unjustly even in a perfect society. Even by his greatest effort, man can only propose to diminish, arithmetically, the sufferings of the world.

Utopian movements produce dystopias.

... if this world were anything near what it should be there would be no more need of a Book Week than there would be a of a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache. They wanted to produce a perfect society by an endless continuation of something that had only been valuable because it was temporary. The wider course would be to say that there are certain lines along which humanity must move, the grand strategy is mapped out, but detailed prophecy is not our business. Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.

Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.

If the world would only build temples to Machinery in the abstract then everything would be perfect. The painter and sculptor would have plenty to do, and could, in complete peace and suitably honored, pursue their trade without further trouble.

Are we deluding ourselves that by snuffing out the lives of our misfits, our nitwits and our psychopathic personalities, we are creating a better world for ourselves.

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

As I’m fond of saying, if you want to find utopia, take a sharp right on money and a sharp left on sex and it’s straight ahead.

Many have dreamed up republics and principalities that have never in truth been known to exist; the gulf between how one should live and how one does live is so wide that a man who neglects what is actually done for what should be done learns the way to self-destruction rather than self-preservation.

The avowed aim of all utopian movements is to put an end to history and to establish a final and permanent calm.

The World has become too dangerous for anything less than Utopia.

In every age and every generation, men have envisioned a promised land. Some may have envisioned it with the wrong ideology, with the wrong philosophical presupposition. But men in every generation thought in terms of some promised land.