Utopia Dystopia Quotes

The life where nothing was ever unexpected. Or inconvenient. Or unusual. The life without colour, pain or past.

All utopias are dystopias. The term "dystopia" was coined by fools that believed a "utopia" can be functional.

Perhaps every society is a utopia when you fail to peel up all the layers and look at what's underneath

Every dystopia is masked by a utopia.

Utopian speculations ... must come back into fashion. They are a way of affirming faith in the possibility of solving problems that seem at the moment insoluble. Today even the survival of humanity is a utopian hope.

The point of creating futures is to get people to imagine what they want and don’t want to happen down the road – and maybe do something about it.

The great milestones of civilization always have the whiff of utopia about them at first. According to renowned sociologist Albert Hirschman, utopias are initially attacked on three grounds: futility (it’s not possible), danger (the risks are too great), and perversity (it will degenerate into dystopia). But Hirschman also wrote that almost as soon as a utopia becomes a reality, it often comes to be seen as utterly commonplace. Not so very long ago, democracy still seemed a glorious utopia. Many a great mind, from the philosopher Plato (427–347 B.C.) to the statesman Edmund Burke (1729–97), warned that democracy was futile (the masses were too foolish to handle it), dangerous (majority rule would be akin to playing with fire), and perverse (the “general interest” would soon be corrupted by the interests of some crafty general or other). Compare this with the arguments against basic income. It’s supposedly futile because we can’t pay for it, dangerous because people would quit working, and perverse because ultimately a minority would end up having to toil harder to support the majority.

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.

Sometimes it's possible, just barely possible, to imagine a version of this world different from the existing one, a world in which there is true justice, heroic honesty, a clear perception possessed by each individual about how to treat all the others. Sometimes I swear I could see it, glittering in the pavement, glowing between the words in a stranger's sentence, a green, impossible vision--the world as it was meant to be, like a mist around the world as it is.

It is their duty to be infantile, even against their inclination.

A fictional Dystopia is better than a fake Utopia.

Our problem right now is that we're so specialized that if the lights go out, there are a huge number of people who are not going to know what to do. But within every dystopia there's a little utopia.

HECUBA: I had a knife in my skirt, Achilles. When Talthybius bent over me, I could have killed him. I wanted to. I had the knife just for that reason. Yet, at the last minute I thought, he's some mother's son just as Hector was, and aren't we women all sisters? If I killed him, I thought, wouldn't It be like killing family?Wouldn't it be making some other mother grieve? So I didn't kill him, but if I had, I might have saved Hector's child. Dead or damned, that's the choice we make. Either you men kill us and are honored for it, or we women kill you and are damned for it. Dead or damned. Women don't have to make choices like that in Hades. There is no love there, nothing to betray.

At the very moment when man is on the verge of realizing his hope, he begins to lose it.

Your realm is an insane place. In Volaria, no-one goes hungry, slaves are no use when they starve. Those freeborn too lazy or lacking in intelligence to turn sufficient profit to feed themselves are made slaves so they can generate wealth for those deserving of freedom, and be fed in return. Here, your people are chained by their freedom, free to starve and beg from the rich. It's disgusting.

The central planners of Democratic Socialism tighten their noose when people resist their plans and assert their rights. All Socialism is intended to devolve into Communism, and as a result, Totalitarianism.

Edward Bellamy's eugenic utopian novel, "Looking Backward" was the inspiration for American Progressivism.

Every eutopia contains a dystopia, every dystopia contains a eutopia. In

Alone among the animals, we suffer from the future perfect tense.

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".

In the age of cyberspace, Lenin lies in ruins.

But utopias always lead to dystopias, and dictators invariably become gods who demand daily worship.

The main goal is to bring utopian sentiments, rather than focusing on the dystopia of the society.

Isn't all politics about revenge, mostly?" "No, it's about doing good." "But your good is my bad. Your utopia is my dystopia.

I have not met a speculative utopia I would want to live in. I’d be bored in utopia. Dystopias, their dark opposites, are a lot more entertaining.

There are those who feel that the world is ultimately moving closer to Truth and to prosperity as the times evolve; then there are those who feel that it is ultimately moving farther away from Truth and into self-destruction. From this, and if it were really that simplistic, one might get the impression that life gravitates slightly into two types of people whom which are diametrically opposed in spirit.

Ich glaube, es gibt keinen wesentlichen Unterschied zwischen dem, was ein biologisches Gehirn leisten kann und dem, was ein Computer leisten kann...Künstliche Intelligenz könnte die grossartigste Idee der Menschheit werden. Aber sie könnte auch unserer letzte sein.

The story is a post-utopia, a somewhat revolutionary form when it was published—and one reader-critic (Jamie Todd Rubin) called it “the first generally ‘post-Singularity’ story ever written in science fiction” (if we had not lost our faith in the American utopian vision, it might have had imitators instead of the wave after wave of dystopias we did get—and continue to get).

All the while, the market and commercial interests are enjoying free rein. The food industry supplies us with cheap garbage loaded with salt, sugar, and fat, putting us on the fast track to the doctor and dietitian. Advancing technologies are laying waste to ever more jobs, sending us back again to the job coach. And the ad industry encourages us to spend money we don’t have on junk we don’t need in order to impress people we can’t stand.28 Then we can go cry on our therapist’s shoulder. That’s the dystopia we are living in today.

Fandom is really fandoms, plural—an always diverse and contentious sphere. Mass media representations of fanfiction and fan culture present it at best as a “wacky world,” or more typically as a bastion of the physically, socially, and literarily inept. Academic accounts of fandom overcompensate, often presenting overly utopian pictures of sisterly collaboration and feminist critique. Utopias and dystopias, though, are not parallel but rather intersecting universes. This is surely one of the great lessons of Star Trek—and of its fandom.

She does not believe that any political ideology can shape society into a utopia. She knows that, instead, even the most earnest utopians always and everywhere create horrific dystopias. She does not believe that scientists are always honest, that rapidly advancing technology will inevitably save us, that everything that is called “progress” is in fact progress. She knows that “experts” are often frauds, that “intellectuals” can be as ignorant as anyone, and that those who most strenuously signal their virtue and are celebrated for it will always prove to be among the most corrupt.

Even as it expanded into a transnational multi-billion-dollar corporation, Google managed to retain its geekily innocent “Don’t Be Evil” image. It convinced its users that everything it did was driven by a desire to help humanity. That’s the story you’ll find in just about every popular book on Google: a gee-whiz tale about two brilliant nerds from Stanford who turned a college project into an epoch-defining New Economy dynamo, a company that embodied every utopian promise of the networked society: empowerment, knowledge, democracy. For a while, it felt true. Maybe this really was the beginning of a new, highly networked world order, where the old structures—militaries, corporations, governments—were helpless before the leveling power of the Internet. As Wired’s Louis Rossetto wrote in 1995, “Everything we know will be different. Not just a change from L.B.J. to Nixon, but whether there will be a President at all.”8 Back then, anybody suggesting Google might be the herald of a new kind of dystopia, rather than a techno-utopia, would have been laughed out of the room. It was all but unthinkable.

Even though comfort based on an illusion is itself illusory, it is for a while a deliverance from the anxiety and existential dread that the world today can generate in abundance. She does not believe that any political ideology can shape society into a utopia. She knows that, instead, even the most earnest utopians always and everywhere create horrific dystopias. She does not believe that scientists are always honest, that rapidly advancing technology will inevitably save us, that everything that is called “progress” is in fact progress. She knows that “experts” are often frauds, that “intellectuals” can be as ignorant as anyone, and that those who most strenuously signal their virtue and are celebrated for it will always prove to be among the most corrupt. Such innate clearheadedness ensures that comforting illusions will elude her, though there are times, as now, when she might welcome the comfort of them. When a majority of people in any society share the same array of illusions and cling passionately to them, they will encourage one another until illusion becomes delusion, until delusion becomes mass insanity. Whole societies do go mad. History is filled with chilling examples.

Conversely, if she has learned one thing about herself that is the most discouraging, it is that she is immune to the illusions in which so many people take comfort. Even though comfort based on an illusion is itself illusory, it is for a while a deliverance from the anxiety and existential dread that the world today can generate in abundance. She does not believe that any political ideology can shape society into a utopia. She knows that, instead, even the most earnest utopians always and everywhere create horrific dystopias. She does not believe that scientists are always honest, that rapidly advancing technology will inevitably save us, that everything that is called “progress” is in fact progress. She knows that “experts” are often frauds, that “intellectuals” can be as ignorant as anyone, and that those who most strenuously signal their virtue and are celebrated for it will always prove to be among the most corrupt. Such innate clearheadedness ensures that comforting illusions will elude her, though there are times, as now, when she might welcome the comfort of them. When a majority of people in any society share the same array of illusions and cling passionately to them, they will encourage one another until illusion becomes delusion, until delusion becomes mass insanity. Whole societies do go mad. History is filled with chilling examples. Joe Smith knew it when he built this house.

It may be that the best we can hope for when it comes to utopias is that they be held at arm's length and regarded as aesthetic constructions, in which various proportions are neatly worked out, contradictions eliminated, and outside intrusions minimized. They are fictions, artifacts of culture. And we should be wary if they ever become much more.

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).

Sleep is often a form of escapism.

It was not the artists' or the politicians' fault, this desolate state of affairs. To a large extent, it was the Soviet Union's fault. In all societies, public rhetoric involves some measure of lying, and history—political history and art history—is made when someone effectively confronts the lie. But in really scary societies all public conversation is an exercise in using words to mean their opposites—in describing the brave as traitorous, the weak as frightening, and the good as bad—and confronting these lies is the most scary and lonely thing a person can do. These are the societies of Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World," or Yevgeny Zamyatin's "We," which preceded it. In Zamyatin's utopia, the guillotine was known as the Machine of the Benefactor, people were known as Numbers, and the power of words was well understood: "Whoever feels capable must consider it his duty to write treatises, poems, manifestos, odes, and other compositions on the greatness and beauty of the United State," Zamyatin had based his dystopia on the Soviet state he witnessed being constructed. Half a century after this death, real words that corresponded to actual facts and feelings broke through in a sudden, catastrophic flood and brought down the Soviet Union. But that heady period of Russian history was winding down by the time Petya and Nadya were learning to talk. Voina faced a challenge that perhaps exceeded challenges faced by any other artist in history: they wanted to confront a language of lies that had once been effectively confronted but had since been reconstructed and reinforced, discrediting the language of confrontation itself. There were no words left.

Looking at the path toward utopia, you will inevitably see a time that appears more like a dystopia.

All of the might of one side is mustered to defend and avenge the innocents; all of the cunning of the other is dedicated to slashing, again and again, at the world’s greatest power by attacking the innocent. Utopia versus Dystopia.

What we are proposing,' Alicia said, 'is that the laws of physics are such that causality violation is subject to a form of version control, one that prevents a forking of history. That instead of causality violation creating an alternate universe, one version of history is outright overwritten by another. One past is replaced with another future. Which means that the memories of the past of the people in that future are replaced with memories of a different past.' Carson interrupted. 'Including the memories of any—' 'Purely hypothetical—' '—time travelers.' 'So take our time traveler from the traditional story,' Carson continued. 'He leaves his utopian future for the past. He kills the butterfly. The Magna Carta is never written. He returns to the dystopian future that his misstep created. But he doesn't see it as a dystopia: he sees it as home, the world he grew up in, the world he left to go back in time. Because he doesn't remember that first future, and has no other world to which he can compare this one. Maybe he even sees it as a utopia. Maybe everyone does. Maybe everyone in this dark place believes that they live in the best of all possible worlds.

Sex is often centre stage in utopias and dystopias – who can do what, with which set of genital organs, and with whom, being one of humanity’s main preoccupations.

neither dystopia nor utopia is our destination. Rather, technology is taking us to protopia. More accurately, we have already arrived in protopia.

From a logical standpoint, it’s more likely that the future will be “protopian.” The world won’t be perfect and happy, but it won’t be an abysmal dystopia either. This means there will be positives and negatives, but overall, it will be a better world. Digital marketing consultant Marcus Wong writes, “Protopia defines a state where we’re no longer fighting for survival (Dystopia), nor are we accepting perfection (Utopia…. Every opportunity to create something new, something faster, something ‘better’—creates a new world of problems that we would have never initially created. This is not a bad thing; some problems are good to have.”[29] In short, we can’t eliminate problems without introducing new ones. This is why we will see progress, but not perfection.[30] Will robots take some workers’ jobs? Yes. There will be automation, but automation will also generate new jobs.

Two important qualifications need mention as this introduction’s closing thoughts. First, anti-Americanism in Europe has always been accompanied by an equally discernable pro-Americanism, which, though less apparent these days, has far from disappeared. From America’s “discovery” by Europeans, it has consistently embodied for them simultaneous opposites: heaven and hell; a desired panacea and a despised abomination; utopia and dystopia; dream and nightmare. Surely, any analysis of Europe’s relations with America, or a comprehensive assessment of how Europeans viewed America over the past 250 years, would necessarily have to include pro-Americanism alongside anti-Americanism.

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.

Dystopias are scary because you can see people struggling, but utopias are scarier because you can see that they stopped.

Nothing endures, nothing is precise and certain (except the mind of a pedant), perfection is the mere repudiation of that ineluctable marginal exactitude which is the mysterious inmost quality of Being.

People get on with it. People have always got on with it. Dystopia is as ridiculous a concept as utopia. Ultimately, we’re animals… and animals find ways.

Every utopia contains a dystopia, every dystopia contains a utopia.

You can have optimism in dystopia. Your decisions make the difference.

From: REFLECTIONS - "Utopia of any sort is impossible. Humanity is far too complex and dichotomous. The pursuit of one Utopian ideal by one group will inevitably hurt and damage another group. Human endeavour, therefore, has to be a balancing act between achieving the greatest good for the greatest number — to quote the classic Utilitarian, Jeremy Bentham — and preventing tyranny. Tyranny always rises out of utopia. Utopia is a contradiction. I think it is Dystopia

Once a utopia in the eyes of many, San Francisco became the nerve center of a new dystopia.

There has always been something slightly bipolar about California. It was either utopia or dystopia, a dream or a nightmare, a hope or a broken promise— and too infrequently anything in between.

During these two and a half hard years, the most encouraging thing Katie has learned about herself is that she’s more resilient than she ever imagined. Perhaps she can be broken, but it has not happened yet. She can be bent so severely that it doesn’t seem as though she can ever straighten herself out again, but she always does. She gets on with getting on. Conversely, if she has learned one thing about herself that is the most discouraging, it is that she is immune to the illusions in which so many people take comfort. Even though comfort based on an illusion is itself illusory, it is for a while a deliverance from the anxiety and existential dread that the world today can generate in abundance. She does not believe that any political ideology can shape society into a utopia. She knows that, instead, even the most earnest utopians always and everywhere create horrific dystopias. She does not believe that scientists are always honest, that rapidly advancing technology will inevitably save us, that everything that is called “progress” is in fact progress. She knows that “experts” are often frauds, that “intellectuals” can be as ignorant as anyone, and that those who most strenuously signal their virtue and are celebrated for it will always prove to be among the most corrupt. Such innate clearheadedness ensures that comforting illusions will elude her, though there are times, as now, when she might welcome the comfort of them.

The ultimate world-historical significance - and oddity - of Los Angeles is that it has come to play the double role of utopia and dystopia for advanced capitalism.

Even though comfort based on an illusion is itself illusory, it is for a while a deliverance from the anxiety and existential dread that the world today can generate in abundance. She does not believe that any political ideology can shape society into a utopia. She knows that, instead, even the most earnest utopians always and everywhere create horrific dystopias. She does not believe that scientists are always honest, that rapidly advancing technology will inevitably save us, that everything that is called “progress” is in fact progress. She knows that “experts” are often frauds, that “intellectuals” can be as ignorant as anyone, and that those who most strenuously signal their virtue and are celebrated for it will always prove to be among the most corrupt