Dystopian Society Quotes

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Only a psychopath would ever think of doing these things, only a psychopath would dream of abusing other people in such a way, only a psychopath would treat people as less than human just for money. The shocking truth is, even though they now have most if not all of the money, they want still more, they want all of the money that you have left in your pockets, they want it all because they have no empathy with other people, with other creatures, they have no feeling for the world which they exploit, they have no love or sense of being or belonging for their souls are dead, dead to all things but greed and a desire to rule over others.
Arun D. Ellis (Corpalism)
Abdul and Mohamed sat down, chilling the conversation at the table. They spoke in Urdu, unaware Lily understood them. When her expression changed subtly, Abdul noticed and switched to speaking English with a mundane comment.
Dennis K. Hausker (Secrets: in a corrupted society)
You can't transform a society for the better with violence, Ashala. Only with ideas.
Ambelin Kwaymullina (The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf (The Tribe, #1))
If we keep punishing people for what their parents or their ancestors have done, the world as a whole can never move forward. Society will never grow.
Jennifer Wilson (Rising (New World, #1))
But there's something fundamentally wrong in a system where a girl like Meredith would even consider staying with a boy like Dylan if she has the chance to be free of him.
Amy Engel (The Book of Ivy (The Book of Ivy, #1))
A utopian system, when established by men, is likely to be synonymous with a dystopian depression. The only way for perfect peace by man is absolute control of all wrongs. Bully-cultures find this: with each and every mistake, another village idiot is shamed into nothingness and mindlessly shut down by the herd. This is a superficial peace made by force and by fear, one in which there is no freedom to breathe; and the reason it is impossible for man to maintain freedom and peace for everyone at the same time. Christ, on the other hand, transforms, instead of controls, by instilling his certain inner peace. This is the place where one realizes that only his holiness is and feels like true freedom, rather than like imprisonment, and, too, why Hell, I imagine, a magnified version of man's never-ending conflict between freedom and peace, would be the flesh's ultimate utopia - yet its ultimate regret.
Criss Jami (Healology)
Loneliness is a form of narcissism. A mother who is in harmony with her child, who understands her place in her child's life and her role in society, is never lonely. Through caring for her child, all her needs are fulfilled.
Jessamine Chan (The School for Good Mothers)
Before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity.
Jeffrey Rosen
I wrote Unwind for lots of reasons, and it poses questions about a lot of subjects. To state it briefly, I wanted to point out how when people take intractable positions on an issue, and stick to extreme sides, sometimes the result is a compromise that is worse than either extreme. I meant it as a wake up call to society -- and to point out that sometimes the problem IS that we take sides on an issue, when a different sort of approach is needed. It's also to pose questions about what it means to be alive. Where does life begin, where does it end -- and point out that there is no single answer to these questions. The problem is people who think there are simple answers. People who see things as simple black-and-white right-and-wrong are the type of people who will end up with a world like the world in Unwind.
Neal Shusterman
I am chaos in this ordered society, the flaw in a carefully wrought plan. I am turbulence in the queen's eternal river.
Eugie Foster (Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast)
cashless society: (n.) dystopian civilization where you can be sure the real terrorists have won.
Sol Luckman (The Angel's Dictionary)
If we keep punishing people for what their parents or their ancestors have done, the world as a whole can never move forward. Society will never grow.” -Triven
Jennifer Wilson (Rising (New World #1))
But if you were matched," I say softly, "What do you think she'd be like?" "You," he says, almost before I've finished, "You.
Ally Condie (Matched (Matched, #1))
We all live in a dystopian society cherishing silently the evil within.
Vinod Varghese Antony
Home, home - a few small rooms, stiflingly over-inhabited by a man, by a periodically teeming woman, by rabble of boys and girls of all ages. No air, no space; an understerilized prison; darkness, disease and smells.
Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)
My chest tightens to the point I fear my heart will suffocate from the pressure of it. Society's standards are the total opposite from how I was raised. The boy who I thought to be so strikingly handsome has less than a year of his life to live, my new friend only a few more months beyond that. Yet they are living these uneventful lives in which they don't think there is a reason for anything. Will I ever see my mother again, or is this how I will be forced to live the rest of my life, as well?
Jen Naumann (Shymers (Shymers, #1))
When I watched you dancing that day, I saw something else. I saw a new world coming rapidly. More scientific, efficient, yes. More cures for the old sicknesses. Very good. But a harsh, cruel world. And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind world, one that she knew in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go. That is what I saw. It wasn't really you, what you were doing, I know that. But I saw you and it broke my heart.
Kazuo Ishiguro
The Earth is nothing but phlegm spat out by the Sun, and our immediate solar system a whirlwind of boulders. There is no "delicate balance".
A.E. Samaan (From a "Race of Masters" to a "Master Race": 1948 to 1848)
Our society is in the midst of mental slavery, on the cusp of physical. We are the checks and balances of society…Revolutions begin here.”—- Alexander
James Farris (Red X Revolution)
Did you hear them, did you hear these monsters talking about monsters? Oh God, the way they jabber about people and their own children and themselves and the way they talk about their husbands and the way they talk about war, dammit, I stand here and I can't believe it!
Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)
She reaches into the unknown and claims his hand, clasping it as if he might evaporate into the night. She’s petrified. Not of the monstrosities prowling the island, but of the demon inside herself. The one about to rip apart her heart and mind to attain a selfish freedom. And it might all be a lie, placed there by the Society.
Laura Kreitzer (Burning Falls (Summer Chronicles, #3))
He smiles at her before ever opening his eyes. The innocence in his face ensnares. Wraps her heart in a cocoon. They did this to him. The Society. Constructed that smile with malicious expectations. Now she must rip it off his face. Because she doesn’t deserve his love. Or Gage’s. This madness coils around her throat, darkening every inch of her soul.
Laura Kreitzer (Burning Falls (Summer Chronicles, #3))
The world is undergoing a movement toward authoritarianism, Delaney, and this is about order. People think the world is out of control. They want someone to stop the changes. This aligns perfectly with what the Every is doing: feeding the urge to control, to reduce nuance, to categorize, and to assign numbers to anything inherently complex. To simplify. To tell us how it will be. An authoritarian promises these things, too.
Dave Eggers (The Every (The Circle, #2))
The ‘lump of equality’ argument, which assumes that if someone is doing well it must be at the expense of someone else, is both false and has been used to previously justify some pretty dystopian actions. When those with power believe that the end justifies the means, any action to achieve this end becomes viable. We’ve seen multiple variations of ideology-based ‘equality’ solutions implemented in the real world; none of which turned out well for those they purported to help.
Sean A. Culey (Transition Point: From Steam to the Singularity)
What they were attempting to do was to bring all the different points of view closer to each other. Perhaps it wasn’t such a bad notion, but the methods that were being used to realise it were built almost entirely on hushing up any antagonism and difficulty. They lied away the problems. They glossed over them with constant improvements in material standards, and hid them behind a fog of meaningless talk pumped out via the radio, press and TV. And the phrase that covered it all was, then as now, ‘harmless entertainment’. The idea was, of course, that the contained infections would heal themselves over time. It didn’t happen. The individual felt physically looked after but robbed of his spiritual autonomy; politics and society became diffuse and incomprehensible; everything was acceptable but nothing was interesting. The individual reacted with bewilderment and gradually growing indifference. And at the bottom of it all there was this indefinable terror. ‘Terror,’ the man went on. ‘I don’t know what of. Do you?
Per Wahlöö (Murder on the Thirty-first Floor (Inspector Jensen #1))
All of us sit here at this conference and feel secure in our belief that we live in an era beyond this kind of…authoritarian regime change; but what sort of political climate do you think could potentially break apart our current stasis and deliver us back in time, so to speak? Thank you, I am gratified there has been so much interest in our little project. Gilead Studies languished for many years, I suppose those who had lived through those times did not want them resurrected for various reasons including what might have been done to them and what they themselves might have done. But at this distance, we can allow ourselves some perspective. It’s fortunate that is the last question as my voice is giving out. As to your question, in times of peace and plenty, it is hard to remember the conditions that have led to authoritarian regime changes in the past. And it is even harder to suppose that we ourselves would ever make such choices or allow them to be made. But when there is a perfect storm and collapse of the established order is in the works precipitated by environmental stresses that lead to food shortages, economic factors such as unrest due to unemployment, a social structure that is top heavy with too much wealth being concentrated among too few, then scapegoats are sought and blamed, fear is rampant, and there is pressure to trade what we think of as liberty for what we think of as safety. And, when the birth rate of any society is low enough to create an aging shrinking population, then commercial and military authorities will become alarmed. Their customer base and their recruitment base will be in jeopardy and there will be extreme pressure on women of childbearing age to make up the population deficit, thus our handmaid and her tale.
Margaret Atwood
Twenty years? No kidding: twenty years? It’s hard to believe. Twenty years ago, I was—well, I was much younger. My parents were still alive. Two of my grandchildren had not yet been born, and another one, now in college, was an infant. Twenty years ago I didn’t own a cell phone. I didn’t know what quinoa was and I doubt if I had ever tasted kale. There had recently been a war. Now we refer to that one as the First Gulf War, but back then, mercifully, we didn’t know there would be another. Maybe a lot of us weren’t even thinking about the future then. But I was. And I’m a writer. I wrote The Giver on a big machine that had recently taken the place of my much-loved typewriter, and after I printed the pages, very noisily, I had to tear them apart, one by one, at the perforated edges. (When I referred to it as my computer, someone more knowledgeable pointed out that my machine was not a computer. It was a dedicated word processor. “Oh, okay then,” I said, as if I understood the difference.) As I carefully separated those two hundred or so pages, I glanced again at the words on them. I could see that I had written a complete book. It had all the elements of the seventeen or so books I had written before, the same things students of writing list on school quizzes: characters, plot, setting, tension, climax. (Though I didn’t reply as he had hoped to a student who emailed me some years later with the request “Please list all the similes and metaphors in The Giver,” I’m sure it contained those as well.) I had typed THE END after the intentionally ambiguous final paragraphs. But I was aware that this book was different from the many I had already written. My editor, when I gave him the manuscript, realized the same thing. If I had drawn a cartoon of him reading those pages, it would have had a text balloon over his head. The text would have said, simply: Gulp. But that was twenty years ago. If I had written The Giver this year, there would have been no gulp. Maybe a yawn, at most. Ho-hum. In so many recent dystopian novels (and there are exactly that: so many), societies battle and characters die hideously and whole civilizations crumble. None of that in The Giver. It was introspective. Quiet. Short on action. “Introspective, quiet, and short on action” translates to “tough to film.” Katniss Everdeen gets to kill off countless adolescent competitors in various ways during The Hunger Games; that’s exciting movie fare. It sells popcorn. Jonas, riding a bike and musing about his future? Not so much. Although the film rights to The Giver were snapped up early on, it moved forward in spurts and stops for years, as screenplay after screenplay—none of them by me—was
Lois Lowry (The Giver (Giver Quartet Book 1))
Before the twentieth century, ideology - as opposed to religion - did not kill people by the millions and tens of millions. The stakes were not thought to be worth it. Such enthusiasm for mass murder awaited the combination of aristocratic militarism, really-existing socialism, and fascism. Thus it was only in the twentieth century that utopian aspirations about how the economy should be organized led nations and global movements to build dystopias to try to bring the utopian future closer. And then they turned around and justified the dystopia: compromises must be made, and this is as good as it is going to get. My view is that too much mental and historical energy has been spent parsing differences between movements that are justly classified as dystopian, and even totalitarian, in aspiration. Time spent on such a task is time wasted, given their commonalities - if not in formal doctrine, then at least in modes of operation. The guards of Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka, Dachau, and the rest were very like the guards of the Gulag Archipelago. Rather, mental and historical energy should be focused on where these movements got their energy. Why was the world unable to offer people a society in which they could live good lives? Why was a total reconfiguration necessary? Karl Polanyi saw fascism and socialism as reactions against the market society's inability or unwillingness to satisfy people's Polanyian rights. It could not guarantee them a comfortable community in which to live because the use to which land was put had to pass a profitability test. It could not offer them an income commensurate with what they deserved because the wage paid to their occupation had to pass a profitability test. And it could not offer them stable employment because the financing to support whatever value chain they were embedded in also had to pass a profitability test. These failures all gave energy to the thought that there needed to be a fundamental reconfiguration of economy and society that would respect people's Polanyian rights. And the hope of millions was that fascism and really-existing socialism would do so. Instead, both turned out to erase, in brutal and absolute ways, people's rights, and people's lives, by the millions. So why were people so gullible? The German socialist Rosa Luxemburg in 1919 could see the path Lenin was embarked upon and called it 'a brutalization of public life: attempted assassinations, shooting of hostages, etc.' The German liberal Max Weber, writing in 1918, could also foresee what would become of Lenin's sociological experiment, saying it would end 'in a laboratory with heaps of human corpses.' Similarly, the British diplomat Eric Phipps wrote in 1935 that if Britain were to take Hitler's Mein Kampf seriously and literally, 'we should logically be bound to adopt the policy of a "preventive" war.' The dangers of a fascist turn were clear. The unlikelihood of success at even slouching toward a good society of those who took that turn ought to have been obvious. Utopian faith is a helluva drug.
J. Bradford DeLong (Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century)
Amazon review: The world building in this novel is supreme. It’s 2049, and the Space Force is up and running. Cars drive themselves in efficient, bumper-to-bumper traffic systems. Cryogenics is a thing, and so are advanced medical implants. There are also scary “advancements” in society such as a Culture Index system (similar to current day China’s) in which the party in power controls how citizens behave by tying their behavior to employment opportunities. Every person is monitored via an unobtrusive implant and/or AI personal assistants.
John Calia (The Awakening of Artemis)
You would argue that we’re not a parasitic life form?’ Arthur challenged. Morgan seemed wounded. ‘Do you think I’m parasitic, Arthur?’ asked Bedivere, his eyebrows raised. ‘No, but—’ ‘How about Gwen?’ he added, teasing. ‘Of course not, I didn’t say that the individual is parasitic, just our current way of life. Consumerism is destroying the planet. No, it has destroyed the planet. Why do you think half the world has starved to death? There’s not enough left to support everyone.’ ‘Says who?’ Morgan snapped. ‘Says common sense.’ He could feel the wine loosening his tongue. ‘People are lying when they say things aren’t that bad. What do you think all those wars were for? We were all just fighting over who got to eat the last éclair.’ Marvin’s stomach growled, and he awkwardly cleared his throat.
M.L. Mackworth-Praed
Now!’ Marvin interjected. ‘You must all be wondering why I invited you here. Well, you know why you’re here, Arthur; and I assume you’ve explained a little about the club to our members—’ ‘We’re looking at alternative truths, right?’ Bedivere asked. ‘The darker side to Britain, and all that.’ ‘Yes, yes, Bedivere, we shall cover that. We shall look at Europe, why we left and why ultimately the EU was disbanded; we shall look at the tragic situation in the United States, and we shall look at the abandonment of the Commonwealth states and the blight of Indonesia. But as well as that we shall also be looking closer to home, at our own histories, and I use the plural intentionally; at the rising rebels in the old Celtic countries, at the redefinition of New National Britain’s borders, and at our absolute ruler himself, George Milton, who thus far has used all his electoral power to claw hold of democratic immunity, whose Party has long since been a change-hand, change-face game of musical chairs with the same policies and people from one party to the next. This brings me to my former point of why I invited you here: because I believe that you three are the smartest, the most open, the most questioning, and that you will benefit most from hearing things from an alternative viewpoint—not always my own, and not always comfortable—that the three of you may one day take what you have learned here and remember it when the world darkens, and this country truly forgets that which it once was.’ There was a deep silence. Even Arthur, who was used to Marvin’s tangential speeches, was momentarily confounded, and in the quiet that followed he observed Bedivere to see what he thought of this side to their teacher. His eyes then slipped to Morgan, and he was surprised to find that she was transfixed. ‘But I must stress to all of you, it is my job at risk in doing this, my life at stake. So when you speak of this, speak only amongst yourselves, and tell no one what it is we discuss here. Understood?’ There was a series of dumbstruck nods of consent. Bedivere cleared his throat with a small cough. ‘And here I thought this was just going to be an extra-curricular history club,’ he joked.
M.L. Mackworth-Praed
Ford’s in his flivver,’ murmured the D.H.C. ‘All’s well with the world.
Aldous Huxley (Brave New World by Aldous Huxley: A Visionary Dystopian Novel of a Controlled Society)
The concept shares elements with the Seasteading movement, a libertarian group of mega-rich preppers intent on building independent floating cities on the high seas. The Seasteading Institute was founded in San Francisco in 2008 by anarcho-capitalist (and Google software engineer) Patri Friedman, with funding from PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel, to ‘establish permanent, autonomous ocean communities to enable experimentation and innovation with diverse social, political, and legal systems’. Some of the ideas they plan to use include harvesting calcium carbonate from seawater to create 3D-printed ‘artificial coral’ cities of upside-down skyscrapers – ‘seascrapers’ – powered by oceanic geothermal energy. Some of this energy will be used to draw nutrients from deeper waters to the surface to grow seaweeds in farms worked on by ‘the poorest billion people on earth’, welcomed because ‘floating societies will require refugees to survive economically’. These floating utopias will ‘liberate humanity from politicians’ while solving the planet’s big problems, it is claimed. For the more sceptical among us, this smells dystopian, rather.
Gaia Vince (Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World)
It’s prohibited, you see. But as I make the laws here, I can also break them. With impunity,
Aldous Huxley (Brave New World by Aldous Huxley: A Visionary Dystopian Novel of a Controlled Society)
Not many years earlier, minions was a serious word; now, like a lot of other words, it’s cartoonish. Wendy has thought a great deal about what is happening to her world. She believes the evolution of minions—and the degradation of language in general—is less because it is associated with characters in an animated-film franchise and more because most of the people in the leadership roles of every profession in this society are simpleminded and sound like cartoon characters every time they use the language—or as though they have stepped out of a bizarre world in a dystopian graphic novel. As a consequence, these cartoonish people are busy shaping a future world as unreal as Batman’s Gotham or Mickey Mouse’s hometown, a world that is therefore sure to fail.
Dean Koontz (The Forest of Lost Souls)
Dystopia is just someone’s failed attempt at utopia. In a dystopian novel or movie, society is the bad guy, or at least one of the antagonists. In real life Nazi society was as much to blame as Hitler. There is usually a “shift” that  initiates this change, this shift can be anything from hunger (“Soylent Green”), to a tornado (the “Wizard of Oz”) to a deadly virus (my story, “Apocalypse Conspiracy).
Michael Bunker (A Taste of Tomorrow 2 - The Dystopian Boxed Set)
I fell silent after that. I didn’t want to talk about such things anymore, at least today. My chest already hurt and I was trying to keep my mind calm. I didn’t want to think of a future so bleak and dark. I had plans for my future and they didn’t involve the world ending or society collapsing.
J.M. Northup (A Ripple of Fear)
Social conservatives do have a pretty decent predictive track record, including in many cases where their fears were dismissed as wild and apocalyptic, their projections as sky-is-falling nonsense, their theories of how society and human nature works as evidence-free fantasies. . . . If you look at the post-1960s trend data — whether it’s on family structure and social capital, fertility and marriage rates, patterns of sexual behavior and their links to flourishing relationships, or just trends in marital contentment and personal happiness more generally — the basic social conservative analysis has turned out to have more predictive power than my rigorously empirical liberal friends are inclined to admit. . . . In the late 1960s and early ’70s, the pro-choice side of the abortion debate frequently predicted that legal abortion would reduce single parenthood and make marriages more stable, while the pro-life side made the allegedly-counterintuitive claim that it would have roughly the opposite effect; overall, it’s fair to say that post-Roe trends were considerably kinder to Roe’s critics than to the “every child a wanted child” conceit. Conservatives (and not only conservatives) also made various “dystopian” predictions about eugenics and the commodification of human life as reproductive science advanced in the ’70s, while many liberals argued that these fears were overblown; today, from “selective reduction” to the culling of Down’s Syndrome fetuses to worldwide trends in sex-selective abortion, from our fertility industry’s “embryo glut” to the global market in paid surrogacy, the dystopian predictions are basically just the status quo. No-fault divorce was pitched as an escape hatch for the miserable and desperate that wouldn’t affect the average marriage, but of course divorce turned out to havesocial-contagion effects as well. Religious fears that population control would turn coercive and tyrannical were scoffed at and then vindicated. Dan Quayle was laughed at until the data suggested that basically he had it right. The fairly-ancient conservative premise that social permissiveness is better for the rich than for the poor persistently bemuses the left; it also persistently describes reality. And if you dropped some of the documentation from today’s college rape crisis through a wormhole into the 1960s-era debates over shifting to coed living arrangements on campuses, I’m pretty sure that even many of the conservatives in that era would assume that someone was pranking them, that even in their worst fears it couldn’t possibly end up like this. More broadly, over the last few decades social conservatives have frequently offered “both/and” cultural analyses that liberals have found strange or incredible — arguing (as noted above) that a sexually-permissive society can easily end up with a high abortion rate and a high out-of-wedlock birthrate; or that permissive societies can end up with more births to single parents and fewer births (not only fewer than replacement, but fewer than women actually desire) overall; or that expressive individualism could lead to fewer marriages and greater unhappiness for people who do get hitched. Social liberals, on the other hand, have tended to take a view of human nature that’s a little more positivist and consumerist, in which the assumption is that some kind of “perfectly-liberated decision making” is possible and that such liberation leads to optimal outcomes overall. Hence that 1970s-era assumption that unrestricted abortion would be good for children’s family situations, hence the persistent assumption that marriages must be happier when there’s more sexual experimentation beforehand, etc.
Ross Douthat
I thought it was just him,” she says, ignoring him. “But then I found out I had the same effect, which means the Society did something to my head too.” Gage’s eyes close, horror washing over him. “You really do love him.” “Yes. No. I don’t know.” Her cries start up again, piercing his heart. “Gage, help me.” “I love you,” he says, holding her closer. “That’s real.
Laura Kreitzer (Burning Falls (Summer Chronicles, #3))
Maybe the Society was right all along. From the very beginning, that’s what they called her. A time bomb. Tick, tick, tick.
Laura Kreitzer (Burning Falls (Summer Chronicles, #3))
I can’t—won’t do that to him,” Summer says sharply. “Or to myself. Besides, your feelings for me aren’t real. The Society did this to you. And if they did it to you, they probably scrambled my brain too. I can’t trust that any of this is real.
Laura Kreitzer (Burning Falls (Summer Chronicles, #3))
Han sank. Hans tætklippede skæg var fyldt med tårer, der reflekterede solskinnet. ”Det hele startede, før du så det i nyhederne,” sagde han, selvom jeg allerede havde regnet den del ud. ”Da de viste manden ved grænsen, og alle troede, det var starten, havde vi allerede adskillelige tusinde døde, og evakueringen var startet. Alting foregår altid under overfladen, du ved, som et isbjerg. I den sidste besked sagde Sara, at de havde mødt Ester, vores nabo, på vej hjem fra Netto. At hun havde virket dårlig, svedende og rystende. Hun havde aet Erik på kinden, som hun plejede, og Sara havde ikke nået at stoppe hende. Så var hun gået ind for at lægge sig, Ester, som hun sagde, og Sara havde skyndt sig ind med Erik og sprittet hans ansigt og hænder. Tre og fyrre minutter senere ringede hun til mig på hospitalet. Tre og fyrre minutter, Amanda.” Jeg græd også nu. Det var ikke mine tab, men jeg græd for alle og alting.
Louise H.A. Trankjær (Vi var så blidt i verden)
Haady talte for, at vi skulle prøve os frem med at snige os ind i en lejr, når vi fandt en. Hvad kunne gå galt? Hvis de opdagede os, var vi hverken bedre eller værre stillede, end hvis vi meldte os selv ved porten. Det ville ikke gøre en forskel. Jeg var i tvivl. Jeg tænkte på deres våben. På pigtråden. ”Vi er jo ikke i Yemen,” sagde Haady med et smil. ”I Danmark skyder man ikke folk. Her taler man bare. De snakker og snakker alle sammen hele tiden.” Han havde vel ret på et eller andet plan, men havde tingene ændret sig med virussen? Familiefaren, der blev slået og skubbet, men jo, han var jo ikke blevet skudt. De havde ikke skudt nogen nede på gaden. Jeg nikkede, spiste det sidste fra min skål og begyndte at vaske den med vand fra en flaske. I dag skulle vi til Ringkøbing. Der var ikke langt herfra. Vi kunne godt være kørt dertil i går aftes, men Haady ville ikke ankomme om aftenen, hvor hans bedstemor måske ville blive bange. Det var bedre at ankomme i dagslys om morgenen, når hun var frisk.
Louise H.A. Trankjær (Vi var så blidt i verden)
Et par gange havde vi gået ekstra ture ind i de små byer og tjekket nogle huse ud, der lå lidt fra søen. Der var et sted, der trak i mig, hver gang vi gik. Det lå lidt fra vandet, måske nogle hundrede meter inde i landet, og en lille asfalteret vej ledte fra syd mod nord i området, mens en større å krydsede igennem området fra øst mod vest ud i søen. Der lå syv huse i umiddelbar nærhed af hinanden, og det var Bulderbyhuse i ægte Lindgren-stil. Der var små folde, hvide hegn, køkkenhaver og frugttræer. Vi havde rekognosceret området flere gange, og vi var sikre på, at der ikke var mennesker tilbage i nærheden. Det var oplagt, at vi skulle slå os ned der, men det gav ingen mening uden de andre. Uden de andre. Det var der, vi var nu. Uden de andre. Det var kun Haady og mig, og derfor trådte plan B i kraft. Vi forlod Gissen sø til fordel for Vimmerby og håbet om at finde strøm og net og ødelægge Beredskabet indefra. Vi pakkede tingene sammen i hytten og satte kurs mod byen. Der var knap tyve kilometer, men det føltes som at gå ind i en helt anden verden efter de mange dage ved søen omgivet af natur og vand. Da husene sluttede tæt om os, stoppede jeg op et øjeblik og snurrede langsomt rundt for at tage det hele ind, denne nye virkelighed, det ensomste menneske i verden. ”Hvad tænker du?” spurgte jeg, selvom jeg vidste, at han var lige så meget på bar bund som jeg, som Mio og Jum-Jum på jagt efter den dybeste hule i det sorteste bjerg. Men vi havde ingen pilefløjter til at hjælpe os på vej. ”Vi finder et godt sted at slå os ned. Det ville være perfekt, hvis vi kunne finde et butikscenter med møbler, tøj og mad i et, så vi kan have alt under samme tag. Der behøver vi heller ikke frygte eventuel oprydning.” Oprydning betød lig. Menneskerester. Hud, hår og knogler. Dyb stank. Jeg nikkede samtykkende, tog en langsom snurretur mere for at prøve at regne ud, hvor sådan et center ville være i en by som Vimmerby, hvis de havde et, men Haady kom mig i forkøbet og pegede skråt fremad mod, hvad der på afstand kunne ligne en form for gågade. ”Kom,” sagde han og vinkede mig med.
Louise H.A. Trankjær (Vi var så blidt i verden)
Selfishness is the way the few grow stronger and the majority grow weaker. When everyone is selfish, no one wins. There will be fewer people who gain power, but for the majority from which that power stems, there will be nothing left to exploit and extract, and that is the dystopian endgame of Capitalism. The process of exploitation is the very element that fuels the cogs of money, and selfication worsens it.
Billy Poon (The Selficated Society: Why We Are Depressed in the Modern Age and How You Can Break Free from Suffering to Live a Life Worthwhile)
The war is not meant to be won. It is meant to be continuous. The essential act of modern warfare is the destruction of the produce of human labour. A hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. In principle, the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects, and its object is not victory over Eurasia or Eastasia, but to keep the very structure of society intact.
George Orwell (1984)
In a society that sells babies to increase government revenue, four women commit crimes against pregnancy and meet in prison. Knowledge is powerful and what they learn about The Auction’s history leads to a plan, a very risky plan, but if successfully implemented it could do more than take down The Auction. It could destroy society as they know it.
Elci North
In order to have equality among a society’s people, there must always be someone, or a group of people, who are not equal to the bigger mass. They produce rules and enforce sameness upon the people who are below them. We must give the illusion of equality in order to satisfy those who beg for it, even if it’s something intangible.
K. Weikel (Sameness)
Government surveillance is a direct assault on the essence of democracy, a betrayal of the trust citizens place in their elected representatives. The emotional toll inflicted by the knowledge that every move is monitored is a corrosive force that eats away at the psychological well-being of individuals, fostering an environment of paranoia and self-censorship. The damage is not just personal but extends to societal trust, creating a chasm between the governed and those in power. Examples of surveillance overreach, from the dystopian pages of history to contemporary revelations, underscore the urgent need to confront and dismantle the machinery of unlawful surveillance that poses a clear and present danger to the very fabric of our free society.
James William Steven Parker
Bokanovsky’s Process is one of the major instruments of social stability!’ Major instruments of social stability. Standard men and women; in uniform batches. The whole of a small factory staffed with the products of a single bokanovskified egg. ‘Ninety-six identical twins working ninety-six identical machines!’ The voice was almost tremulous with enthusiasm. ‘You really know where you are. For the first time in history.’ He quoted the planetary motto. ‘Community, Identity, Stability.’ Grand words. ‘If we could bokanovskify indefinitely the whole problem would be solved.’ Solved by standard Gammas, unvarying Deltas, uniform Epsilons. Millions of identical twins. The principle of mass production at last applied to biology.
Aldous Huxley (Brave New World by Aldous Huxley: A Visionary Dystopian Novel of a Controlled Society)
Success went fizzily to Bernard’s head, and in the process completely reconciled him (as any good intoxicant should do) to a world which, up till then, he had found very unsatisfactory. In
Aldous Huxley (Brave New World by Aldous Huxley: A Visionary Dystopian Novel of a Controlled Society)
It was the sort of idea that might easily decondition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes—make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere; that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge. Which was, the Controller reflected, quite possibly true. But not, in the present circumstance, admissible. He picked up his pen again, and under the words ‘Not to be published’ drew a second line, thicker and blacker than the first; then sighed. ‘What fun it would be,’ he thought, ‘if one didn’t have to think about happiness!
Aldous Huxley (Brave New World by Aldous Huxley: A Visionary Dystopian Novel of a Controlled Society)
What about self-denial, then? If you had a God, you’d have a reason for self-denial.’ ‘But industrial civilization is only possible when there’s no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning.’ ‘You’d have a reason for chastity!’ said the Savage, blushing a little as he spoke the words. ‘But chastity means passion, chastity means neurasthenia. And passion and neurasthenia mean instability. And instability means the end of civilization.
Aldous Huxley (Brave New World by Aldous Huxley: A Visionary Dystopian Novel of a Controlled Society)
My dear young friend,’ said Mustapha Mond, ‘civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency. In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic. Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise. Where there are wars, where there are divided allegiances, where there are temptations to be resisted, objects of love to be fought for or defended—there, obviously, nobility and heroism have some sense. But there aren’t any wars nowadays. The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving any one too much.
Aldous Huxley (Brave New World by Aldous Huxley: A Visionary Dystopian Novel of a Controlled Society)
But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.’ ‘In fact,’ said Mustapha Mond, ‘you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.’ ‘All right, then,’ said the Savage defiantly, ‘I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.
Aldous Huxley (Brave New World by Aldous Huxley: A Visionary Dystopian Novel of a Controlled Society)
Why was that old fellow such a marvellous propaganda technician? Because he had so many insane, excruciating things to get excited about. You’ve got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can’t think of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases.
Aldous Huxley (Brave New World by Aldous Huxley: A Visionary Dystopian Novel of a Controlled Society)
the awful reality—but sublime, but significant, but desperately important precisely because of the imminence of that which made them so fearful.
Aldous Huxley (Brave New World by Aldous Huxley: A Visionary Dystopian Novel of a Controlled Society)
Of course it does. Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a  good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.
Aldous Huxley (Brave New World by Aldous Huxley: A Visionary Dystopian Novel of a Controlled Society)
The air was drowsy with the murmur of bees and helicopters.
Aldous Huxley (Brave New World by Aldous Huxley: A Visionary Dystopian Novel of a Controlled Society)
Alphas are so conditioned that they do not have to be infantile in their emotional behaviour. But that is all the more reason for their making a special effort to conform. It is their duty to be infantile, even against their inclination. And
Aldous Huxley (Brave New World by Aldous Huxley: A Visionary Dystopian Novel of a Controlled Society)
The optimum population,’ said Mustapha Mond, ‘is modelled on the iceberg-eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above.
Aldous Huxley (Brave New World by Aldous Huxley: A Visionary Dystopian Novel of a Controlled Society)
I was a pretty good physicist in my time. Too good-good enough to realize that all our science is just a cookery book, with an orthodox theory of cooking that nobody’s allowed to question, and a list of recipes that mustn’t be added to except by special permission from the head cook.
Aldous Huxley (Brave New World by Aldous Huxley: A Visionary Dystopian Novel of a Controlled Society)
He was a philosopher, if you know what that was.’ ‘A man who dreams of fewer things than there are in heaven and earth,
Aldous Huxley (Brave New World by Aldous Huxley: A Visionary Dystopian Novel of a Controlled Society)
Call it the fault of civilization. God isn’t compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.
Aldous Huxley (Brave New World by Aldous Huxley: A Visionary Dystopian Novel of a Controlled Society)
What about self-denial, then? If you had a God, you’d have a reason for self-denial.’ ‘But industrial civilization is only possible when there’s no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning.
Aldous Huxley (Brave New World by Aldous Huxley: A Visionary Dystopian Novel of a Controlled Society)
Surely everyone has a story?’ I asked. ‘Like how they say everyone has a book in them?’ He shook his head and pinched the bridge of his nose before replying. ‘Not everyone does have a book in them. Some people don’t even have a Post-it note.’ ‘It’s just something people say,’ I sniffed, wiping greasy fingers on my heavy napkin and feeling guilty about the greasy finger marks. ‘You really don’t think it’s true?’ ‘You do?’ Nick asked. ‘Take you, for example. According to you, you don’t have a favourite book, a favourite band, a favourite movie. What story would you write?’ ‘For all you know, I am a fantastic writer,’ I said, starting to get a bit angry again. Fueled by the overconfidence of far too much food, I slapped the table. It hurt. ‘How do you know I’m not writing an amazing novel about a dystopian society where a reanimated Henry VIII falls in love with a squirrel?’ ‘Well, look at you and your completely insane imagination.
Lindsey Kelk (About a Girl (A Girl, #1))
The herd, at large, will eat up almost any nonsensical hyperbole that is pushed down their throats, so long as it validates their fragile world-view. Hence, it is the responsibility of those with critical thinking skills to heed the role of a sombre shepherd, to be nurturing bearers of bad news. Going under for a surgery is painful, but it mitigates the likelihood of future injuries. Humanity faces a similar ordeal, we must briefly suffer for the greater good. Therefore, turn away from gluttony, neurotic armchair anarchism and self-inducing victimhood, instead, pursue a diligent, disciplined life, and bear a tragic responsibility for every aspect of your life. Forego intellectual masturbation and axiomatise your earthly pursuits in empathy. Put everything on the line for the sake of humanities well-being, regardless of the consequences or ostracisation. Crucify yourself to plant the seeds for a nurturing, anti-dystopian future.
Corey Simon
Money and beauty run this city. Nobody wants to believe anybody that handsome and charming could be so evil.
K. C. Ariel
Dystopia is a society that has been poisoned to its core. It is corrupt, misguided, ineffectual, immoral, tyrannical, uncontrollable, or all of the above. Few crises are more profound or disturbing, which makes dystopian narratives extremely valuable for extremist ideologues and propagandists.
J.M. Berger (Extremism)
The individual felt physically looked after but robbed of his spiritual autonomy; politics and society became diffuse and incomprehensible; everything was acceptable but nothing was interesting. The individual reacted with bewilderment and gradually growing indifference. And at the bottom of it all there was this indefinable terror. ‘Terror,’ the man went on. ‘I don’t know what of. Do you?
Per Walhöö
We're mired in a paradox wherein people write absurd stories about societies on the verge of collapse, but in reality, the worst dystopian world is the one in which we currently live our daily lives.
Jane Fade Merrick (Ashes of the Phoenix – The Fade)
The truth is ugly. It's a demon with razor-sharp teeth and talons that will shred you to bloody little pieces. Their lies are shrouded in beauty, attractive and believable to the average person. But with time, the people blind to the Society's transgressions will witness that pretty layer being ripped away, revealing the demon that's coming for them, too.
Jessica Scurlock (Pretty Lies (Pretty Lies Series, #1))
The reshaping of dystopian writing in the aftermath of World War II was dominated by five themes. Firstly, humanity entered the nuclear age on 16 July 1945. By the mid-1950s we could destroy ourselves completely, and there were good reasons to assume we would. Secondly, the spectre of environmental degeneration, later transmuted into a discourse on climate change, with a potentially catastrophic outcome, emerged in the 1970s. Thirdly, the progress of mechanization threatened ever more subordination of people to machines, and an increasing blurring of human/machine identity. Fourthly, liberal non-totalitarian societies showed serious signs of cultural degeneration into intellectual senility and enslavement to a mindless ethos of hedonistic consumption. Finally, anxiety regarding the ‘War on Terror’ came to dominate the news.
Gregory Claeys (Dystopia: A Natural History)
Silicon Valley entrepreneurs love to describe their products as "democratizing access", "connecting people", and, of course, "making the world a better place". That vision of technology as a cure-all for global inequality has always been something of a wistful mirage, but in the age of AI it could turn into something far more dangerous. If left unchecked, AI will dramatically exacerbate inequality on both international and domestic levels. It will drive a wedge between the AI superpowers and the rest of the world, and may divide society along class lines that mimic the dystopian science fiction of Hao Jingfang. As a technology and an industry, AI naturally gravitates toward monopolies. Its reliance on data for improvement creates a self-perpetuating cycle: better products lead to more users, those users lead to more data, and that data leads to even better products, and thus more users and data. Once a company has jumped out to an early lead, this kind of ongoing repeating cycle can turn that lead into an insurmountable barrier to entry for other firms.
Kai-Fu Lee
In the end you can't always choose what to keep. You can only choose how you let it go.
Ally Condie (Matched (Matched, #1))
Walker Percy in his 1971 dystopian novel Love in the Ruins paints a picture of a morally degenerate America consumed by hedonism, wallowing in ignorance, led by kleptocrats and fools, fragmented into warring and often violent cultural extremes, and on the cusp of a nuclear war. It is a country cursed by its failure to address or atone for its original sins of genocide and slavery. The ethos of ceaseless capitalist expansion, white supremacy, and American exceptionalism, perpetuated overseas in the country’s imperial wars, eventually consumes the nation itself. The accomplices, who once benefited from this evil, become its victims. How, Percy asks, does one live a life of meaning in such a predatory society? Is it even possible? And can a culture ever regain its equilibrium when it sinks into such depravity? The
Chris Hedges (America: The Farewell Tour)
hullabaloo
Aldous Huxley (Brave New World by Aldous Huxley: A Visionary Dystopian Novel of a Controlled Society)
brave new world,
Aldous Huxley (Brave New World by Aldous Huxley: A Visionary Dystopian Novel of a Controlled Society)