Religion

"I believe in some sort of strange fashion that the presence of the atom bomb might almost be forcing a level of human development that wouldn’t have occurred without the presence of the atom bomb. Maybe this degree of terror will force changes in human attitudes that could not have occurred without the presence of these awful, destructive things. Perhaps we are faced with a race between the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse in one line and the 7th Calvary in the other. We have not got an awful lot of mid ground between Utopia and Apocalypse, and if somehow our children ever see the day in which it is announced that we do not have these weapons any more, and that we can no longer destroy ourselves and that we’ve got to do something else to do with our time than they will have the right to throw up their arms, let down their streamers and let forth a resounding cheer."

"There will not be one kind of community existing and one kind of life led in utopia. Utopia will consist of utopias, of many different and divergent communities in which people lead different kinds of lives under different institutions. Some kinds of communities will be more attractive to most than others; communities will wax and wane. People will leave some for others or spend their whole lives in one. Utopia is a framework for utopias, a place where people are at liberty to join together voluntarily to pursue and attempt to realize their own vision of the good life in the ideal community but where no one can impose his own utopian vision upon others."

"Utopian thinking is not merely futile, it is also profoundly immoral since it contradicts the structure of man's thought and action in its applicability to the world. Since it misleads man, it is an ultimately irresponsible doctrine. The philosopher... denies that good may be so increased as to obscure evil, that man may be substantially changed, and that society may take upon itself the qualities denied to individual man and thus secure happiness for the latter. ..."If we cannot produce virtuous individuals," the utopian says, "let us produce a virtuous society; instead of individual virtues, we shall have social virtues." ...The orientation is to build a social body, a mankind that thinks and acts as one, that is both persuaded and organized in view of becoming "perfect." ...Hence the striking intellectual failure of the idealogue, fruit of his profound immorality. ...his is the sin of pride, the sin that requires the greatest stupidity. It is ironical that he who is committed to a rational-scientific view, should be the real simple-minded one, the poor in the soul. Will it be forgiven him?"

"Utopia is a meta-utopia: the environment in which Utopian experiments may be tried out; the environment in which people are free to do their own thing; the environment which must, to a great extent, be realized first if more particular Utopian visions are to be realized stably."

"In Utopia all greed for money was entirely removed with the use of money. What a mass of troubles was then cut away! What a crop of crimes was then pulled up by the roots! Who does not know that fraud, theft, rapine, quarrels, disorders, brawls, seditions, murders, treasons, poisonings, which are avenged rather than restrained by daily executions, die out with the destruction of money? Who does not know that fear, anxiety, worries, toils, and sleepless nights will also perish at the same time as money? What is more, poverty, which alone money seemed to make poor, forthwith would itself dwindle and disappear if money were entirely done away with everywhere."

"To sequester out of the world into Atlantic and Utopian polities, which never can be drawn into use, will not mend our condition; but to ordain wisely as in this world of evil, in the midst whereof God hath placed us unavoidably. Nor is it Plato’s licensing of books will do this, which necessarily pulls along with it so many other kinds of licensing, as will make us all both ridiculous and weary, and yet frustrate; but those unwritten, or at least unconstraining laws of virtuous education, religious and civil nurture, which Plato there mentions, as the bonds and ligaments of the Commonwealth, the pillars and the sustainers of every written statute; these they be which will bear chief sway in such matters as these, when all licensing will be easily eluded. Impunity and remissness, for certain are the bane of a Commonwealth, but here the great art lies to discern in what the law is to bid restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work."

"One persistent strand in utopian thinking, as we have often mentioned, is the feeling that there is some set of principles obvious enough to be accepted by all men of good will, precise enough to give unambiguous guidance in particular situations, clear enough so that all will realize its dictates. and complete enough to cover all problems which actually arise. Since I do not assume that there are such principles, I do not presume that the political realm will whither away. The messiness of the details of a political apparatus and the details of how it is to be controlled and limited do not fit easily into one's hopes for a sleek, simple utopian scheme."

"If the "liberal" mentality is prone to take flights into Utopia, the "reactionary" is guilty of sensing plots in every human enterprise involving hope, enthusiasm, and will to change. The correct attitude of this conflict must stem... from a rediscovery of philosophy which has enough courage to free itself of the historical-ideological-utopian perspective. ...this philosophy must re-emphasize man versus the collective body (with its envisaged collectivized mind), freedom versus the mechanization of inner and social life, common sense versus faith in science."

"When I die, I want to die in a Utopia that I have helped to build."

"In its flexibility and in its wide-open opportunities, this is the total Utopia. Anything that you can conceive of, you can do in this non-world. Nothing can stop you except a total bankruptcy of creativity. The seedbed is waiting. All the circumstances stand ready. The fructifying minerals are literally jumping out of the ground. And nothing grows. And nothing grows. And nothing grows. Well, why doesn't it?"

"Utopias in general are surrogates for heaven; they give a meager solace to the individual that his sufferings and endeavors may enable future generations to enter the chiliastic paradise."

"We are not utopians, we do not indulge in "dreams" of dispensing at once with all administration, with all subordination; these anarchist dreams ... serve only to postpone the socialist revolution until human nature has changed. No, we want the socialist revolution with human nature as it is now, with human nature that cannot dispense with subordination, control and "managers." ... The united workers themselves ... will hire their own technicians, managers and bookkeepers, and pay them all, as, indeed, every state official, ordinary workmen's wages."

"We announce the birth of a conceptual country, NUTOPIA. Citizenship of the country can be obtained by declaration of your awareness of NUTOPIA. NUTOPIA has no land, no boundaries, no passports, only people. NUTOPIA has no laws other than cosmic. All people of NUTOPIA are ambassadors of the country. As two ambassadors of NUTOPIA, we ask for diplomatic immunity and recognition in the United Nations of our country and our people."

"Is not the minimal state, the framework for utopia, an inspiring vision? The minimal state treats us as inviolate individuals, who may not be used in certain ways by others as means or tools or instruments or resources; it treats us as persons having individual right with the dignity this constitutes. Treating us with respect by respecting our rights, it allows us, individually or with whom we please, to choose our life and to realize our ends and our conception of ourselves, insofar as we can, aided by the voluntary cooperation of other individuals possessing the same dignity. How dare any state or group of individuals do more? Or less?"

"Utopias are invented to be realized, and as long as there is no demand for an improvement of living conditions, changing things is impossible."

"If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. And if we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong. If we are wrong, Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer that never came down to Earth. If we are wrong, justice is a lie, love has no meaning. And we are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until "justice runs down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.""

"I will now confess my own utopia. I devoutly believe in the reign of peace and in the gradual advent of some sort of socialistic equilibrium. The fatalistic view of the war function is to me nonsense, for I know that war-making is due to definite motives and subject to prudential checks and reasonable criticisms, just like any other form of enterprise. And when whole nations are the armies, and the science of destruction vies in intellectual refinement with the science of production, I see that war becomes absurd and impossible from its own monstrosity. Extravagant ambitions will have to be replaced by reasonable claims, and nations must make common cause against them. … I look forward to a future when acts of war shall be formally outlawed as between civilized peoples."

"The first attempt to run trawler fishing off Iceland was made in 1899 by an Englishman who had settled in Hafnarfjörður. The name of the ship was Utopia, which was prophetic because the enterprise came to nothing and was abandoned that same autumn."

"I myself think it our bounden duty to believe in such international rationality as possible. But, as things stand, I see how desperately hard it is to bring the peace-party and the war-party together, and I believe that the difficulty is due to certain deficiencies in the program of pacifism which set the military imagination strongly, and to a certain extent justifiably, against it. In the whole discussion both sides are on imaginative and sentimental ground. It is but one utopia against another, and everything one says must be abstract and hypothetical."

"Critics of utopianism have argued that utopian ends inevitably are used to legitimize violent means, whether against the scapegoated opponents of a utopian project or against innocent bystanders who must pay a price for the greater good of society."

"The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognised 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."

"We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. What we lack is a liberal Utopia, a programme which seems neither a mere defence of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but a truly liberal radicalism which does not spare the susceptibilities of the mighty (including the trade unions), which is not too severely practical and which does not confine itself to what appears today as politically possible…Those who have concerned themselves exclusively with what seemed practicable in the existing state of opinion have constantly found that even this has rapidly become politically impossible as the result of changes in a public opinion which they have done nothing to guide. Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost."

"Critics contend that utopianism privileges uniformity over diversity, consensus over dissent, and end-of-history stasis over ongoing change. Is it possible in a utopian society to permit expressions of diversity that might lead to conflict? Can anything essentially new happen after utopia has been achieved. Or do genuinely new ideals inherently threaten utopias? Once built, must they become conservative in some sense?"

"If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution—then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise."

"The youth of humanity all around our planet are intuitively revolting from all sovereignties and political ideologies. The youth of Earth are moving intuitively toward an utterly classless, raceless, omnicooperative, omniworld humanity. Children freed of the ignorantly founded educational traditions and exposed only to their spontaneously summoned, computer-stored and -distributed outflow of reliable-opinion-purged, experimentally verified data, shall indeed lead society to its happy egress from all misinformedly conceived, fearfully and legally imposed, and physically enforced customs of yesterday. They can lead all humanity into omnisuccessful survival as well as entrance into an utterly new era of human experience in an as-yet and ever-will-be fundamentally mysterious Universe."

"Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment. . . . Humanity is in "final exam" as to whether or not it qualifies for continuance in Universe."

"How can there ever be a utopia? There is no right way to live, which we’ve simply failed to stumble upon. There is no set of rules, there is no system, there is no formula. Why should there be? Short of the existence of a creator—and a perverse one, at that—why should there be some blueprint for perfection, just waiting to be discovered?"

"Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labelled Utopian."

"[W]e have crossed a great divide, between what we used to do in all of previous human history and what we do now. Utopia, it is true, this is not. I imagine Bellamy would be at once impressed and disappointed. The economic historian helps explain why. ...With our increasing wealth, what used to be necessities become matters of little concern ...conveniences turn into necessities. Luxuries turn into conveniences. And we humans envision and then create new luxuries. ...He saw humanity on a hedonic treadmill: "...the triumph of economic growth is not a triumph of humanity over material wants; rather, it is a triumph of material wants over humanity." ...[T]his hedonic treadmill is one powerful reason why, even when all went very well, we only slouched rather than galloped toward utopia."

"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 and progress. And of myself, for whom melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin."

"Marxist dreams legitimized Soviet gulags, and religious visions have justify crusades and jihads. This explains why the term “utopia” so often is used pejoratively and visionaries often are dismissed as mad or sick. The pursuit of a perfect society can justify and even demand the use of any means possible, including the violent purging of all who resist that glorious end. In short, redemptive visions can inspire redemptive violence."

"Utopias of equality are biologically doomed, and the best that the amiable philosopher can hope for is an approximate equality of legal justice and educational opportunity."

"There were a lot of utopias in the nineteenth century, wonderful societies that we might possibly construct. Those went pretty much out of fashion after World War I. And almost immediately one of the utopias that people were trying to construct, namely the Soviet Union, threw out a writer called Zamyatin who wrote a seminal book called We, which contains the seeds of Orwell and Huxley. Writers started doing dystopias after we saw the effects of trying to build utopias that required, unfortunately, the elimination of a lot of people before you could get to the perfect point, which never arrived."

"The ground-root folly of this piteous philantropy is thinking to distribute indivisibles, and make equality in things incommensurable: forged under such delusions, all Utopias are castles in the air or counsels of despair."

"In shattering the perceived rigidity of the present, utopianism paves the way for change. Perfect worlds may not be realizable or even desirable, but that doesn’t mean we should shy away from imagining and striving for a better future. Societies without extreme inequality and environmental degradation are surely within the bounds of possibility. Whether in the form of a creative novel, a social movement, or a political proposal, dreaming can help us get there."

"Utopia lies at the horizon. When I draw nearer by two steps, she retreats two steps. If I proceed ten steps forward, she swiftly slips ten steps ahead. No matter how far I go, I can never reach it. For what might utopia be useful? It is useful for this: to keep walking."

"Heaven is home. Utopia is here. Nirvana is now."

"Utopias and other models of government, based on the public good, may be inconceivable because of the disordered human passions which, under the wrong governments, seek to highlight the poorly conceived or selfish interest of the community. But even though we find it impossible, they are ridiculous to sinful people whose sense of self-destruction prevents them from believing."

"Utopianism is manifest in countless historical examples of those that have dared to challenge the status quo and assert that things can — and indeed, must — change. Take Martin Luther King’s dream of a world free of racial segregation for example, or the strivings of the suffragettes for gender equality... Now, our relationship with the natural world is humanity’s defining challenge — and utopian ideas have shifted to meet it. “Ecotopian” aspirations are already in full view in community networks attempting to create more conscious ways of living such as the Transition Network, social movements such as Extinction Rebellion, and bold policy proposals such as the USA’s “Green New Deal.” What’s more, many of the ideas put forth by these projects were long since imagined in prominent ecotopian literary works."

"It is solemnly said that this is a transition period; but the whole history of humanity has been one continual transition period. The great and delightful thing about human existence is that it has been engaged from the beginning of time in one everlasting crisis. Humanity went to bed every night expecting to wake up and find itself divine. The whole of history is the vigil of a festival. This is, I think, the essential error which gives that strange air of unreality, even of a kind of spectral horror, to all the Utopias which are now written about the ultimate condition of men."

"The spirit of rebellion is a spirit of desperation-a desperate rejection of whatever exists, a desperate aspiration toward some kind of utopia. ...It is governed by a blind momentum... and its so-called leaders are... its captives, and ultimately its victims. ...The so-called "betrayal" is... the necessary conclusion... [I]ts impossible intentions are unrealizable... the end result is... a regime which pretends to embody these intentions and... enforces such false pretentions by terror. A revolution... is a... practical exercise in political philosophy. ...It requires an attentive prudence, a careful calculation of means and ends, a spirit of sobriety... [A] successful revolution cannot be governed by the spirit of the mob. ...[I]f ...revolution is not to degenerate into a rebellion, mob actions must be marginal... [O]nly a self-disciplined people can... undertake... a revolution. ...[A] successful revolution is best accomplished by a people who do not really want it at all, but find themselves reluctantly making it."

"“It occurs to me that the man and his religion are one and the same thing. The unknown exists. Each man projects on the blankness the shape of his own particular world-view. He endows his creation with his personal volitions and attitudes. The religious man stating his case is in essence explaining himself. When a fanatic is contradicted he feels a threat to his own existence; he reacts violently.” “Interesting!” declared the fat merchant. “And the atheist?” “He projects no image upon the blank whatever. The cosmic mysteries he accepts as things in themselves; he feels no need to hang a more or less human mask upon them. Otherwise, the correlation between a man and the shape into which he molds the unknown for greater ease of manipulation is exact.”"

"Kitty made the acquaintance of Madame Stahl too, and this acquaintance, together with her friendship with Varenka, did not merely exercise a great influence on her, it also comforted her in her mental distress. She found this comfort through a completely new world being opened to her by means of this acquaintance, a world having nothing in common with her past, an exalted, noble world, from the height of which she could contemplate her past calmly. It was revealed to her that besides the instinctive life to which Kitty had given herself up hitherto there was a spiritual life. This life was disclosed in religion, but a religion having nothing in common with that one which Kitty had known from childhood, and which found expression in litanies and all-night services at the Widow's Home, where one might meet one's friends, and in learning by heart Slavonic texts with the priest. This was a lofty, mysterious religion connected with a whole series of noble thoughts and feelings, which one could do more than merely believe because one was told to, which one could love."

"Honour your parents; worship the gods; hurt not animals."

"For the majority of mankind, religion is a habit, or, more precisely, tradition is their religion. Though it seems strange, I think that the first step to moral perfection is your liberation from the religion in which you were raised. Not a single person has come to perfection except by following this way."

"In religion all other countries are paupers; India is the only millionaire."

"None are so likely to believe too little as those who have begun by believing too much."

"Nec religionis est cogere religionem."

"Though free to think and act, we are held together, like the stars in the firmament, with ties inseparable. These ties cannot be seen, but we can feel them. I cut myself in the finger, and it pains me: this finger is a part of me. I see a friend hurt, and it hurts me, too: my friend and I are one. And now I see stricken down an enemy, a lump of matter which, of all the lumps of matter in the universe, I care least for, and it still grieves me. Does this not prove that each of us is only part of a whole? For ages this idea has been proclaimed in the consummately wise teachings of religion, probably not alone as a means of insuring peace and harmony among men, but as a deeply founded truth. The Buddhist expresses it in one way, the Christian in another, but both say the same: We are all one."

"It is a mistake to suppose that God is only, or even chiefly, concerned with religion."