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Utopian Quotes

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Utopian Quotes

“The Anarchists' uncompromising rejection of the State, the subject of Marxian sneers for its "absolutist" and "Utopian" character, makes much better sense in the present era than the Marxist relativist and historical approach. The pacifists also seem to be more realistic than the Marxist both in their understanding of modern war and also in their attempts to do something about it.”

WarStatesCharacterSeemsUnderstandingModernSubjectsApproachHistoricalErasRejectionRealisticAnarchistUtopianMarxistPacifistUncompromisingSneerModern War
Book:Root is man: progressivism vrs. radicalism
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“Digital technologies are setting down the new grooves of how people live, how we do business, how we do everything--and they're doing it according to the expectations of foolish utopian scenarios. We want free online experiences so badly that we are happy to not be paid for information that comes from us now or ever. That sensibility also implies that the more dominant information becomes in our economy, the less most of us will be worth.”

PeopleWantTechnologyEconomyInformationExpectationsPaidFoolishSettingSettingsDigitalOnlineSensibilityDominantScenariosUtopianGrooveDigital Technology
Book:Who Owns the Future?
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“Political philosophy is realistically utopian when it extends what are ordinarily thought to be the limits of practicable political possibility and, in so doing, reconciles us to our political and social condition. Our hope for the future of our society rests on the belief that the social world allows a reasonably just Society of Peoples.”

WorldPhilosophyPoliticalBeliefSocialConditionsPossibilityLimitsOur SocietyPolitical PhilosophyReconcileUtopianHope For The FutureSocial Conditions
Book:The Law of Peoples: With, The Idea of Public Reason Revisited
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“Books are surviving in this intense, fragmented, hyper-accelerated present, and my sense and hope is that things will slow down again and people will want more time for a contemplative life. There is no way people can keep up this pace. No one is happy. Two or three hours to read should not be an unattainable thing, although I hope we get to that stage without needing a corporate sponsored app to hold our hand. The utopian in me has my fingers crossed that we haven't quite figured out the digital future just yet. After all, the one thing we know about people: they always surprise.”

PeopleKnowsWayWantShouldTwoBookHandsThreeHoursOne ThingStageHavensSurpriseFingersIntenseCorporateDigitalMore TimePaceSlow DownSurvivingUtopianContemplativeUnattainableAppsHyperFragmentedContemplative LifeFingers Crossed
Author:Junot Diaz
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“Wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life. Knowing this gives me hope that human wholeness - mine, yours, ours - need not be a utopian dream, if we can use devastation as a seedbed for new life”

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Book:A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life
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“That's not a utopian vision. It is a set of ideas that we think are important to discuss. Those ideas largely have to do with sustainability of cities. The ability of cities to, over time, remain in balance with the resource streams that are available to them, and they have to do with social justice and equity of the fundamental conditions of satisfactory citizenship.”

ThinkingImportantIdeasSocialJusticeAbilityCitiesVisionConditionsBalanceResourcesSocial JusticeFundamentalsAvailableStreamsSustainabilityCitizenshipEquityUtopian
Author:William J. Mitchell
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“'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.”

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Author:Veronica Roth
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“The system - the American one, at least - is a vast and noble experiment. It has been polestar and exemplar for other nations. But from kindergarten until she graduates from college the girl is treated in it exactly like her brothers. She studies the same subjects, becomes proficient at the same sports. Oh, it is a magnificent lore she learns, education for the mind beyond anything Jane Austen or Saint Theresa or even Mrs. Pankhurst ever dreamed. It is truly Utopian. But Utopia was never meant to exist on this disheveled planet.”

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Book:The province of the heart
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“When I wrote 'The Giver,' it contained no so-called 'bad words.' It was set, after all, in a mythical, futuristic, and Utopian society. Not only was there no poverty, divorce, racism, sexism, pollution, or violence in the world of 'The Giver'; there was also careful attention paid to language: to its fluency, precision, and power.”

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Author:Lois Lowry
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“We cannot create blueprint for future society, but it is good to think about that. It is good to have in mind a goal. It is constructive, it is helpful, it is healthy, to think about what future society might be like, because then it guides you somewhat what you are doing today, but only so long as this discussions about future society don't become obstacles to working towards this future society. Otherwise you can spend discussing this utopian possibility versus that utopian possibility, and in the mean time you are not acting in a way that would bring you closer to that.”

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Author:Howard Zinn
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“It is singular to look round upon a country where the dreams of sages, smiled at as utopian, seem distinctly realized, a people voluntarily submitting to laws of their own imposing, with arms in their hands respecting the voice of a government which their breath created and which their breath could in a moment destroy!”

PeopleLooksCountryMomentsDreamHandsSeemsGovernmentLawVoiceArmsBreathsRoundsSageImposingUtopian
Book:Views of society and manners in America: in a series of letters from that country to a friend in England, during the years 1818, 1819, and 1820
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“To want a job that exercises a man's capacities in an enterprise useful to society, is utopian anarcho-syndicalism; it is labor invading the domain of management. No labor leader has entertained such a thought in our generation. Management has the "sole prerogative" to determine the products.”

MenWantJobsLeaderGenerationsProductsExerciseCapacityLaborManagementDetermineEnterpriseSoleDomainUtopianOur GenerationPrerogativeInvading
Book:Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society
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“Our belief in salvation through the market is very much in the Utopian tradition. The economists and managers are the servants of God. Like the medieval scholastics, their only job is to uncover the divine plan. They could never create or stop it. At most they might aspire to small alterations.”

MightJobsBeliefPlansDivineTraditionSalvationManagersServantAspireEconomistMedievalUtopianServant Of GodAlterationsScholastics
Book:The Unconscious Civilization
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“What begins as a Utopian vision, always - always - ends in bloodshed. Because you have to force a utopia on a free people. Free people want to pursue their own happiness, but a one-size-fits-all approach requires herding the free, against their will, into the state's idea of what's right. Then it's not utopia.”

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Book:The Joy of Hate: How to Triumph over Whiners in the Age of Phony Outrage
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“Democracy begins in human conversation. A democratic conversation does not require elaborate rules of procedure or utopian notions of perfect consensus. What it does require is a spirit of mutual respect-people conversing critically with one another in an atmosphere of honesty and shared regard.”

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Book:Who will tell the people: the betrayal of American democracy
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“[Walt] Whitman and [humanist educator John] Dewey tried to substitute hope for knowledge. They wanted to put shared utopian dreams - dreams of an ideally decent and civilized society - in the place of knowledge of God's Will, Moral Law, the Laws of History, or the Facts of Science.... As long as we have a functioning political left, we still have a chance to achieve our country, to make it the country of Whitman's and Dewey's dreams.”

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Author:Richard Rorty
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“What does interest me is how difficult my culture seems to find it to look the dark side of life directly in the eye. It seems to me that if we look back at mediaeval culture, for example, we see a society which faces the reality of death and pain and limitation, because it has to. Our society, which is progressive and technological and seems to have a slightly fanatical utopian edge to it, gets very uncomfortable when anybody highlights the dark side of humanity, or the world we have built, or what we are doing to the rest of life on Earth.”

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Author:Paul Kingsnorth
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“One thing that struck me about going to those tech conferences was all the enthusiasm for free culture, and remixing, and social media, but people's greatest ambition was to be sponsored by Chipotle or something equivalent to that. It was this weird mix of collaborative, utopian claims and this total acquiescence to commercial imperatives.”

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Author:Astra Taylor
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“Look back on the utopian dreams of the previous century, or even the century before that, where people thought machines would ultimately give us a quality of life where our needs would be taken care of so we could all basically be artists together in the evening, after we had fished, hunted, raised cattle - or whatever it was Marx imagined for us.”

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Author:Astra Taylor
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“I try to look at the evolution of these utopian claims. In the late '60s there was an assumption that the wealth generated by industry would be taxed and then put into social programs and it would provide a baseline of stability that would allow people to have the time for self-expression; and that social contract has eroded over the last four decades and now it's every person for themselves.”

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Author:Astra Taylor
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