These Utopia quotes will inspire you. A utopia typically describes an imaginary community or society that possesses highly desirable or nearly perfect qualities for its members.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging utopia quotes, utopia sayings, and utopia proverbs.
Best Utopia Quotes
- “There can be no peace on earth as long as there is war in love.” ~ Dieter Duhm
- “Utopias are often just premature truths.” ~ Alphonse de Lamartine
- “In the next few years the struggle will not be between utopia and reality, but between different utopias, each trying to impose itself on reality … we can no longer hope to save everything, but … we can at least try to save lives, so that some kind of future, if perhaps not the ideal one, will remain possible.” ~ Albert Camus
- “We are at heart so profoundly anarchistic that the only form of state we can imagine living in is Utopian; and so cynical that the only Utopia we can believe in is authoritarian.” ~ Lionel Trilling
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“Progress is the realization of utopia.” ~ Oscar Wilde
- “The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.” ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
- “Think of it. We are blessed with technology that would be indescribable to our forefathers. We have the wherewithal, the know-it-all to feed everybody, clothe everybody, and give every human on Earth a chance. We know now what we could never have known before – that we now have the option for all humanity to make it successfully on this planet in this lifetime. Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
- “Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.” ~ Helen Keller
- “….This world needs Utopias as it needs fairy stories. It does not matter so much where we are going, as long as we are making consciously for some definite goal. And a Utopia, however strange or fanciful, is the only possible beacon upon the uncharted seas of the distant future.” ~ Hendrik Willem van Loon
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“All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in.” ~ Toni Morrison
- “Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labeled Utopian.” ~ Emma Goldman
- “Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache… Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.” ~ George Orwell
- “Human beings will be happier – not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That’s my utopia.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut
- “Widely spaced earth-sheltered towns offer sweeping views over the plains. High-speed trains link the communities. Food is grown in the region. Bikeways are everywhere. Nonpolluting hydrogen powers all vehicles. Sunlight and wind generate the hydrogen. Note the earth-covered bridges, the continuous window bands, the wind machines across the farmlands. In this new America, everything is reused, recycled, conserved.” ~ Malcolm Wells
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“Utopia is that which is in contradiction with reality.” ~ Albert Camus
- “In Utopia, where every man has a right to everything, they all know that if care is taken to keep the public stores full, no private man can want anything; for among them there is no unequal distribution, so that no man is poor, none in necessity; and though no man has anything, yet they are all rich; for what can make a man so rich as to lead a serene and cheerful life, free from anxieties.” ~ Thomas More
- “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.” ~ Anatole France
- “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.” ~ Nadine Gordimer
- “None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.” ~ Theodor Adorno
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“Some who are too scrupulous to steal your possessions nevertheless see no wrong in tampering with your thoughts.” ~ Khalil Gibran
- “The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.” ~ Frank Herbert
- “Our aims in political activism are not, and should not be, to create a perfect utopia.” ~ Paul Wellstone
- “To know oneself is to disbelieve utopia.” ~ Michael Novak
- “Literature is my Utopia” ~ Helen Keller
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“I believe that he who sows utopia will reap reality.” ~ Carlo Petrini
- “Utopias rest on the fallacy that perfection is a legitimate goal of human existence.” ~ Lewis Mumford
- “Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.” ~ Victor Hugo
- “Global warming has melted the polar ice caps, raised the levels of the oceans and flooded the earth’s great cities. Despite its evident prosperity, New Jersey is scarcely Utopia.” ~ Godfried Danneels
- “You can use your idealism to further your aims, if you realize that nothing is Nirvana, nothing is perfect.” ~ Jon Stewart
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“Misery motivates, not utopia.” ~ Karl Marx
- “Utopians…consider individual freedom as the stumbling block on which the grandiose idea of mankind’s totalization may flounder.” ~ Thomas Steven Molnar
- “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.” ~ Fredric Jameson
- “All my writing is about the recognition that there is no single reality. But the beauty of it is that you nevertheless go on, walking towards utopia, which may not exist, on a bridge which might end before you reach the other side.” ~ Marguerite Young
- “‘Divergent’ was my utopian world. I mean, that wasn’t the plan. I never even set out to write dystopian fiction, that’s just what I had when I was finished. At the beginning, I was just writing about a place I found interesting and a character with a compelling story, and as I began to build the world, I realized that it was my utopia.” ~ Veronica Roth , Utopia quotes and dystopia
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“How would I myself live in this proposed society? How long would it be before I went stark staring mad?” ~ William Golding
- “I don’t wish to defend everything that has been done in the name of Utopia. But I think many of the attacks misconceive its nature and function. As I have tried to suggest, utopia is not mainly about providing detailed blueprints for social reconstruction. Its concern with ends is about making us think about possible worlds. It is about inventing and imagining worlds for our contemplation and delight. It opens up our minds to the possibilities of the human condition.” ~ Hans Magnus Enzensberger
- “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.” ~ Gunter Grass
- “Those who made and endorsed our Constitution knew man’s nature, and it is to their ideas, rather than to the temptations of utopia, that we must ask that our judges adhere.” ~ Robert Bork
- “The commune movement is part of a reawakening of belief in the possibilities for utopia that existed in the nineteenth century and exist again today, a belief that by creating the right social institution, human satisfaction and growth can be achieved.” ~ Rosabeth Moss Kanter
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“I would say my theme has always been paradise lost, always the lost cause, the lost leader, the lost utopia.” ~ Marguerite Young
- “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
- “Utopias are presented for our inspection as a critique of the human state. If they are to be treated as anything but trivial exercises of the imagination. I suggest there is a simple test we can apply. We must forget the whole paraphernalia of social description, demonstration, expostulation, approbation, condemnation. We have to say to ourselves, How would I myself live in this proposed society? How long would it be before I went stark staring mad?” ~ William Golding , Utopia quotes society
- “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
- “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.” ~ Oscar Wilde
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“Melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.” ~ Gunter Grass
- “For other nations, utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is just beyond the horizon.” ~ Henry A. Kissinger
- “Eager souls, mystics and revolutionaries, may propose to refashion the world in accordance with their dreams; but evil remains, and so long as it lurks in the secret places of the heart, utopia is only the shadow of a dream” ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
- “The future is a choice between Utopia and oblivion.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
- “An island Utopia in a modern, busy, everyday world. A land where there are neither rich nor poor. A heaven on earth – without a fence around it.” ~ William Wrigley, Jr.
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“Abandon all hopes of utopia – there are people involved.” ~ Clayton Cramer
- “What we should grasp, however, from the lessons of European history is that, first, there is nothing necessarily benevolent about programmes of European integration; second, the desire to achieve grand utopian plans often poses a grave threat to freedom; and third, European unity has been tried before, and the outcome was far from happy.” ~ Margaret Thatcher
- “(A unified) ‘Europe’ is the result of plans. It is, in fact, a classic utopian project, a monument to the vanity of intellectuals, a programme whose inevitable destiny is failure: only the scale of the final damage done is in doubt.” ~ Margaret Thatcher
- “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.” ~ Eduardo Galeano
- “A utopia cannot, by definition, include boredom, but the ‘utopia’ we are living in is boring.” ~ Lars Svendsen
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“A race of altruists is necessarily a race of slaves. A race of free men is necessarily a race of egoists.” ~ Max Stirner
- “The conservative “thinks of political policies as intended to preserve order, justice, and freedom. The ideologue, on the contrary, thinks of politics as a revolutionary instrument for transforming society and even transforming human nature. In his march toward Utopia, the ideologue is merciless.” ~ Russell Kirk
- “In a word, literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book-friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness. The things I have learned and the things I have been taught seem of ridiculously little importance compared with their “large loves and heavenly charities.” ~ Helen Keller
- “Why have we had to invent Eden, to live submerged in the nostalgia of a lost paradise, to make up utopias, propose a future for ourselves?” ~ Julio Cortazar
- “[The healthcare bill is a] headlong rush into socialism….we will not stand for the Obama-Pelosi-Reid hijacking of our freedom and democracy so they can impose their socialist ‘utopia’ of higher taxes, restricted access, inferior quality, and deadly inefficiency on the best health care system in the world….You and the RNC are all that stand between the Democrats’ scheme to take more of your hard-earned income to pay for this unsustainable, freedom destroying entitlement and an opportunity to work for real, truly bipartisan step-by-step solutions.” ~ Michael Steele
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“Happiness is the chief material also in the construction of Utopias.” ~ Wyndham Lewis
- “All the Utopias will come to pass only when we grow wings and all people are converted into angels.” ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
- “Without effort and change, human life cannot remain good. It is not a finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive and active.” ~ Bertrand Russell
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“No Utopia is Utopia for everyone” ~ Karen Joy Fowler
- “The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.” ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- “I think that there is always a part of utopia in any romantic relationship.” ~ Pedro Almodovar
Utopia was coined by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, describing a fictional island society in the New World.
