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1ea4757
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The life where nothing was ever unexpected. Or inconvenient. Or unusual. The life without colour, pain or past.
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future
life
the-giver
utopia
sci-fi
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Lois Lowry |
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c948dce
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The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything....The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place.
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gulag
novels
utopia
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Milan Kundera |
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6d72b64
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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. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.
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utopia
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Oscar Wilde |
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a669134
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The search for Nirvana, like the search for Utopia or the end of history or the classless society, is ultimately a futile and dangerous one. It involves, if it does not necessitate, the sleep of reason. There is no escape from anxiety and struggle.
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struggle
reason
nirvana
class
society
utopia
irrationality
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Christopher Hitchens |
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5e26872
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Totalitarianism is not only hell, but all the dream of paradise-- the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another. Andre Breton, too, dreamed of this paradise when he talked about the glass house in which he longed to live. If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence. Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way. and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets even smaller and poorer.
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totalitarianism
paradise
utopia
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Milan Kundera |
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d54cdd9
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I grew up in a utopia, I did. California when I was a child was a child's paradise, I was healthy, well fed, well clothed, well housed. I went to school and there were libraries with all the world in them and after school I played in orange groves and in Little League and in the band and down at the beach and every day was an adventure. . . . I grew up in utopia.
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libraries
library
music
groves
little-league
orange
beach
california
utopia
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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4b73313
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"Oh my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger. Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions. There is one who remembers the way to your door: Life you may evade, but Death you shall not. You shall not deny the Stranger. They constantly try to escape From the darkness outside and within By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.
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death
life
imperfection
utopia
questions
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T.S. Eliot |
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10c2a5f
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"Sometimes I think Earth has got to be the insane asylum of the universe. . . and I'm here by computer error. At sixty-eight, I hope I've gained some wisdom in the past fourteen lustrums and it's obligatory to speak plain and true about the conclusions I've come to; now that I have been educated to believe by such mentors as Wells, Stapledon, Heinlein, van Vogt, Clarke, Pohl, (S. Fowler) Wright, Orwell, Taine, Temple, Gernsback, Campbell and other seminal influences in scientifiction, I regret the lack of any female writers but only Radclyffe Hall opened my eyes outside sci-fi.
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fairy-tales
morality
science
hope
humanist
belief
science-fiction
secular
danger
utopia
atheist
respect
sci-fi
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Forrest J. Ackerman |
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f44e8f9
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They constantly try to escape From the darkness outside and within By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good. But the man that is will shadow The man that pretends to be.
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perfection
escape
goodness
system
shadow
utopia
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T.S. Eliot |
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30e02ea
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The great hatred of capitalism in the hearts of the oppressed, ancient and modern, I think, stems not merely from the ensuing vast inequality in wealth, and the often unfair and arbitrary nature of who profits and who suffers, but from the silent acknowledgement that under a free market economy the many victims of the greed of the few are still better off than those under the utopian socialism of the well-intended. It is a hard thing for the poor to acknowledge benefits from their rich moral inferiors who never so intended it. (p.272)
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wealth
income-disparity
progressivism
western-culture
military-history
economics
society
inequality
utopia
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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43b5548
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From being a movement aiming for universal freedom, communism turned into a system of universal despotism. That is the logic of utopia.
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suffering
philosophy
despotism
utopia
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John Gray |
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ad6ba8e
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Moreover, we have seen enough by now to know that technological changes in our modes of communication are even more ideology-laden than changes in our modes of transportation. Introduce the alphabet to a culture and you change its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community, history and religion. Introduce the printing press with movable type, and you do the same. Introduce speed-of-light transmission of images and you make a cultural revolution. Without a vote. Without polemics. Without guerrilla resistance. Here is ideology, pure if not serene. Here is ideology without words, and all the more powerful for their absence. All that is required to make it stick is a population that devoutly believes in the inevitability of progress. And in this sense, all Americans are Marxists, for we believe nothing if not that history is moving us toward some preordained paradise and that technology is the force behind that movement.
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progress
television
culture
utopia
ideology
technology
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Neil Postman |
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c0c8fdb
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It's tempting to ask why if you fed your neighbors during the time of the earthquake and fire, you didn't do so before or after.
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inspirational
thought-provoking
utopia
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Rebecca Solnit |
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d80a57a
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"Old Rekohu's claim to singularity, however, lay in its unique pacific creed. Since time immemorial, the Moriori's priestly caste dictated that whosoever spilt a man's blood killed his own mana - his honor, his worth, his standing & his soul. No Moriori would shelter, feed, converse with, or even see the persona non grata. If the ostracized murderer survived his first winter, the desperation of solitude usually drove him to a blowhole on Cape Young, where he took his life. Consider this, Mr. D'Arnoq urged us. Two thousand savages (Mr. Evans's best guess) enshrine "Thou Shalt Not Kill" in word & in deed & frame an oral "Magna Carta" to create a harmony unknown elsewhere for the sixty centuries since Adam first tasted the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. War was as alien a concept to the Moriori as the telescope is to the Pygmy. Peace, not a hiatus betwixt wars but millennia of imperishable peace, rules these far-flung islands. Who can deny Old Rekohu lay closer to More's Utopia than our States of Progress governed by war-hungry princelings in Versailles & Vienna, Washington & Westminster? "Here," declaimed Mr. D'Arnoq, "and where only, were those elusive phantasms, those noble savages, framed in flesh & blood!" (Henry, as we later made our back to the Musket confessed, "I could never describe a race of savages too backwards to throw a spear as 'noble."
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war
peace
utopia
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David Mitchell |
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010272b
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Revolutions produce other men, not new men. Halfway between truth and endless error, the mold of the species is permanent. That is Earth's burden.
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original-sin
utopia
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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b6075b3
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And an even stronger example of Mr. Wells's indifference to the human psychology can be found in his cosmopolitanism, the abolition in his Utopia of all patriotic boundaries. He says in his innocent way that Utopia must be a world-state, or else people might make war on it. It does not seem to occur to him that, for a good many of us, if it were a world-state we should still make war on it to the end of the world. For if we admit that there must be varieties in art or opinion what sense is there in thinking there will not be varieties in government? The fact is very simple. Unless you are going deliberately to prevent a thing being good, you cannot prevent it being worth fighting for. It is impossible to prevent a possible conflict of civilizations, because it is impossible to prevent a possible conflict between ideals. If there were no longer our modern strife between nations, there would only be a strife between Utopias. For the highest thing does not tend to union only; the highest thing, tends also to differentiation. You can often get men to fight for the union; but you can never prevent them from fighting also for the differentiation. This variety in the highest thing is the meaning of the fierce patriotism, the fierce nationalism of the great European civilization. It is also, incidentally, the meaning of the doctrine of the Trinity.
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war
trinity
difference
separation
utopia
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G.K. Chesterton |
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271b5fb
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"Well, gentlemen, I have listened to all your Solutions, and I now inform you that I, and I alone, except perhaps for Walt Trowbridge and the ghost of Pareto, have the perfect, the inevitable, the only Solution, and that is: There is no Solution! There will never be a state of society anything like perfect! "There never will be a time when there won't be a large proportion of people who feel poor no matter how much they have, and envy their neighbors who know how to wear cheap clothes showily, and envy their neighbors who can dance or make love or digest better."
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perfection
poverty
politics
solutions
envy
society
utopia
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Sinclair Lewis |
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1498193
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At the very moment when man is on the verge of realizing his hope, he begins to lose it.
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utopia
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Erich Fromm |
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95cdb48
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The Fascist utopia, like that of the Communists, was false, and generated immense suffering. But there were those who dreamed it sincerely.
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fascism
utopia
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Norman Davies |
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c113103
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"In agricultural communities, male leadership in the hunt ceased to be of much importance. As the discipline of the hunting band decayed, the political institutions of the earliest village settlements perhaps approximated the anarchism which has remained ever since the ideal of peaceful peasantries all round the earth. Probably religious functionaries, mediators between helpless mankind and the uncertain fertility of the earth, provided an important form of social leadership. The strong hunter and man of prowess, his occupation gone or relegated to the margins of social life, lost the umambiguous primacy which had once been his; while the comparatively tight personal subordination to a leader necessary to the success of a hunting party could be relaxed in proportion as grain fields became the center around which life revolved.
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utopia
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William H. McNeill |
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e7eebd9
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(...)si nos convencemos de que la humanidad puede trascender colmillos y garras, si nos convencemos de que las diversas razas y credos pueden compartir pacificamente la tierra, (...)si nos convencemos de que los gobernantes deben ser justos, de que la violencia debe dominarse, de que el poder ha de ser responsable y las riquezas de la tierra y los oceanos deben repartirse equitativamente entre todos, este mundo se hara realidad. No me engano. Ya se que es el mas dificil de los mundos posibles.
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spanish
utopia
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David Mitchell |
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ba70f7e
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To write a letter is to send a message to the future; to speak of the present with an addressee who is not there, knowing nothing about how that person is (in what spirits, with whom) while we write and, above all, later: while reading over what we have written. Correspondence is the utopian form of conversation because it annihilates the present and turns the future into the only possible place for dialogue.
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utopia
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Ricardo Piglia |
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08420a5
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I am offered the Grand Inquisitor's choice. Will you choose freedom without happiness, or happiness without freedom? The only answer one can make, I think, is: No.
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freedom
happiness
utopia
resistance
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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2568cfd
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What use was utopia without joy, after all? What was the point of all their striving if it did not include the laughter of the young?
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youth
utopia
young
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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3355fdd
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En el campo... En el campo... Me encantaba el campo. Queria estar lejos de las ciudades, lejos de la excitacion. Solo me apetecia tumbarme de espaldas bajo un arbol y leer un libro o dibujar, y dejar de preocuparme porque me asaltaran, dejar de llevar una faca o terminar casado con alguna fulana como una cabra. Asi debia de ser el campo, pense ensonadoramente.
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paraiso
fantasía
utopia
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S.E. Hinton |