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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It gets to seem as if way back in the Garden of Eden after the Fall, Adam and Eve had begged the Lord to forgive them and He, in his boundless exasperation, had said, All right, then. Stay. Stay in the Garden. Get civilized. Procreate. Muck it up. And they did.
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There is one expanding horror in American life. It is that our long odyssey toward liberty, democracy and freedom-for-all may be achieved in such a way that utopia remains forever closed, and we live in freedom and hell, debased of style, not individual from one another, void of courage, our fear rationalized away.
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Suppose a nation in some distant region should take the Bible for their only law book, and every member should regulate his conduct by the precepts there exhibited. What a Utopia! What a paradise this region would be.
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From the very fountain of enchantment there arises a taste of bitterness to spread anguish amongst the flowers.
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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?
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I am not describing a distant utopia, but the kind of education which must be the great urgent work of our time. By the end of this decade, un...
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The hard-core intentionalist expresses only the most remote concern for consequences - usually, some vague, distant utopia. But this is, in most cases, a rationalization. His real satisfaction comes from a sense of doing the right thing - even when right has, in his mind, no clear connection with reality.
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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.
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It is my right to be uncommon. For I do not choose to be a common man, If I can, I seek opportunity. I do not wish to be a kept citizen, humbled and dulled by having the government look after me. I choose to take the calculated risk, to dream, to build, to fail or succeed. I choose not to barter incentive for a dole, I prefer the challenges of life to a guaranteed existence, the thrill of fulfillment to the state calm of Utopia. I will not trade my freedom for beneficence nor my dignity for a handout.
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Cycle tracks will abound in Utopia.
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Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.
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Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the sense shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.
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Baseball is a harbor, a seclusion from failure that really matters, a playful utopia in which virtuosity can be savored to the third decimal place of a batting average.
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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.
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The abominable effort to take one's sins with one to paradise.
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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.
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The Utopia the bible seems to want would have people hate evil when it is time to hate and suggests that people who turn away from the world to follow His word would in turn be hated and those people who hate them are to be humiliated in the end.
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Santa Barbara is a paradise; Disneyland is a paradise; the U.S. is a paradise. Paradise is just paradise. Mournful, monotonous, and superficial though it may be, it is paradise. There is no other.
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Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.
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Paradise is exactly like where you are right now... only much, much better.
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I know not what the younger dreams— Some vague Utopia—and she seems,...
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In all the round world of Utopia there is no meat. There used to be, But now we cannot stand the thought of slaughterhouses. And it is impossible to find anyone who will hew a dead ox or pig. I can still remember as a boy the rejoicings over the closing of the last slaughterhouse.
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A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists, all powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death.
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Everyone who has ever built anywhere a new heaven first found the power thereto in his own hell.
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There is nothing like dream to create the future. Utopia to-day, flesh and blood tomorrow.
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A fool's paradise is a wise man's hell!
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