(36 quotes found)
“The standard that a society should actually embody its own professed principles is a utopian one, in the sense that moral principles contradict the way things really are --- and always will be. How things really are --- and always will be --- is neither all-evil nor all-good but deficient, inconsistent, inferior. Principles invite us to do something about the morass of contradictions in which we function morally. Principles invite us to clean up our act; to become intolerant of moral laxity and compromise and cowardice and the turning away from what is upsetting: that secret gnawing of the heart that tells us that what we are doing is not right, and so counsels us that we'd be better off just not thinking about it.”
Susan Sontag
“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.”
Gunter Grass
“If work and leisure are soon to be subordinated to this one utopian principle -- absolute busyness -- then utopia and melancholy will come to coincide: an age without conflict will dawn, perpetually busy -- and without consciousness.”
“An acre in Middlesex is better than a principality in Utopia”
Thomas Babington Macaulay
“Cycle tracks will abound in Utopia.”
H. G. Wells
“The house a woman creates is a Utopia. She can't help it - can't help trying to interest her nearest and dearest not in happiness itself but in the search for it.”
Marguerite Duras
“Perhaps the greatest utopia would be if we could all realize that no utopia is possible; no place to run, no place to hide, just take care of business here and now.”
Jack Carroll
“To know oneself is to disbelieve utopia”
Michael Novak
“The great universal family of men is a utopia worthy of the most mediocre logic.”
Isidore Ducasse Lautreamont
“In a utopia you want to win matches by several goals and by playing a wonderful brand of football. But that's utopia.”
Stuart Pearce
Bookmark
