Utopia

“ Utopia itself is but another word for time; and some day the masses, who now heed us not, or smile incredulously at our proceedings, will awake to our conceptions. Then our knowledge, like light rapidly conveyed from one torch to another, will bury us in its brightness. ”

“ I forget that a Utopia is a thing of the imagination that becomes more fragile with every added circumstance, that, like a soap-bubble, it is most brilliantly and variously coloured at the very instant of its dissolution. ”

“ For these, after all, are mere Utopias; their details are the outcome of individual wishes; what will emerge must be, not a Utopia at all, either yours or mine, but a practical reality, full of shifts and compromises most unphilosophical and illogical—a practical reality distasteful in many ways to all us Utopia-mongers. ”

“ Sir Thomas smacked the humor of the thing, in giving the name Utopia, which is Greek for Nowhere. If, indeed, men were all honest, and women all virtuous and children all rosy and helpful, we might all live in a Utopia of our own. All the Fourierites—the Socialists—the Knights of Labor might find the germs of their best arguments in this reservoir of the ideal maxims of statecraft. ”

“ Down the mountain we shall go and down the passes, and as the valleys open the world will open, Utopia, where men and women are happy and laws are wise, and where all that is tangled and confused in human affairs has been unravelled and made right. ”

“ Utopia; to be frightened at it, or to think that we can do any good by scolding it or binding it with chains of tow, is simply silly. It moves, and it carries the Superior Person with it and in it, like a mote of dust. ”

“ They are said, though it is not easy to believe, to have been elaborated by way of Utopia. If so, no Utopia has ever yet been presented in a style so little calculated to stir the imagination, to warm the feelings, to soothe the insurgency of the reason. ”

“ We want our Utopia NOW--and we're going to try our hands at it. All we want is--everything for all of us! For every housewife and every longshoreman and every Hindu nationalist and every teacher. We want everything. ”

“ It is our first reminder that Utopia too must have a history. We cross it and find the Reuss, for all that it has already lit and warmed and ventilated and cleaned several thousands of houses in the dale above, and for all that it drives those easy trams in the gallery overhead, is yet capable of as fine a cascade as ever it flung on earth. So we come to a rocky path, wild as one could wish, and descend, discoursing how good and fair an ordered world may be, but with a certain unformulated qualification in our minds about those thumb marks we have left behind. ”

“ But is there not too much joy in Utopia? Is not the sky too cloudless? Is not the atmosphere [223] too clear? Does the Utopian never act from a sense of duty? Has he never to do anything that is distasteful to him? ”

“ And yet now that I come to think it over, is not this too one of the necessary differences between a Modern Utopia and those finite compact settlements of the older school of dreamers? It is not to be a unanimous world any more, it is to have all and more of the mental contrariety we find in the world of the real; it is no longer to be perfectly explicable, it is just our own vast mysterious welter, with some of the blackest shadows gone, with a clearer illumination, and a more conscious and intelligent will. ”

“ Such a Utopia as this may be looked upon as fulfilling the true social function of Art; standing midway between theory and practice; inspired by thought, and stimulating action. Only the social artist has to look to it that his thoughts be not merely true but adequate, lest he degenerate into a mere decorator. ”

“ But it is at least a Utopia specially adapted to a given place and time, one in which every feature of landscape and history is made the most of, one in which a beginning can be made at once, leaving room for further developments as occasion may serve. ”

“ Its high literary merit, the picture it drew of Utopia realized, the remedy it pointed out from the standard of an actual modern experience, the relief it offered to millions of starving men and women made it the sensation of the day. ”

“ The fanatical chanting came back to him, the quivering filthy faces, the sea of leaping, whirling celebrants. This—this was the dazzling future. An Utopian thought it had been, to attempt to escape from an imperfect society into one conceived to fulfill ideal human values. But the word, Utopia, was from an ancient race, the Greeks, and significantly enough meant: "Nowhere."
They had ignored the temper of individuals, variable human nature—which they had thought to control by conditioning—or the inevitable opposition of entrenched groups such as the Anarchs. ”

“ It comes to us then, clear and full, that our imagination has realised itself; we dismiss quite finally a Rip-Van-Winkle fancy we have entertained, all the unfamiliarities of our descent from the mountain pass gather together into one fullness of conviction, and we know, we know, we are in Utopia. ”

“ There had been spread before me the realization—on a small, sample scale of course—of all the ideals for which our civilization has been striving: security, intelligence, humanity, and order; and here was the instinctive hostile reaction, not of the natural man, but of a so-called cultivated man upon such a Utopia. ”

“ The criticism really suggests a sound criterion. Unless the change proposed be practicable, the Utopia will doubtless be impossible. And unless some practicable change be proposed, the Utopia, even were it embodied in practice, would be useless. ”

“ You have only to look at all these houses below. (We should be sitting on a seat on the Gütsch and looking down on the Lucerne of Utopia, a Lucerne that would, I insist, quite arbitrarily, still keep the Wasserthurm and the Kapellbrucke.) You have only to mark the beauty, the simple cleanliness and balance of this world, you have only to see the free carriage, the unaffected graciousness of even the common people, to understand how fine and complete the arrangements of this world must be. ”

“ He is something refined, with some knowledge, perhaps, of the minor pains and all the civil self-controls; he has read more than he has suffered, and suffered rather than done. He regards me with his blue-grey eye, from which all interest in this Utopia has faded. ”

“ This combination of philosophy, politics, and fiction, though borrowed from the ideal republic of Plato, is worthy of an experienced statesman and a philosopher who at that moment was writing not only above his age, but, as it afterwards appeared, above himself. It has served as the model of that novel class of literature—political romances. But though the “Utopia” is altogether imaginary, it displays no graces of the imagination in an ingeniously constructed fable. ”

“ Ah, you describe a second Utopia, or the golden age. A few in each generation might reach that clear, chill region of sublime thought; but the rank and file of womankind, and perhaps of mankind, would despise them as cranks. ”

“ All we learn is, that there hovered in his mind's eye some vague Utopia, in which public affairs would go on very much of themselves, through the mere force of universal Benevolence, liberated from the bosom of Nature. ”

“ Persons of conservative minds who live in prejudice and in the faith of authority apply the term Utopia to every ideal which has not been legalized and sanctioned by time, custom, or authority. This is a grave error, which, if it always prevailed, would bar the way to all social progress. ”

“ This infinite world must needs be flattened to get it on one retina. The picture of a solid thing, although it is flattened and simplified, is not necessarily a lie. Surely, surely, in the end, by degrees, and steps, something of this sort, some such understanding, as this Utopia must come. ”

“ We will have no liberty upon it, but instant obedience to known law and appointed persons; no equality upon it, but recognition of every betterness that we can find, and reprobation of every worseness.’ It is not surprising that plans so visionary have failed to regenerate society; it is surprising that men should have been willing to join in the effort to realise such a Utopia. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There was no denying our blond friend. If this Utopia is indeed to parallel our earth, man for man—and I see no other reasonable choice to that—there must be this sort of person and kindred sorts of persons in great abundance. ”

“ Along this road, as along any other road, we shall not reach Utopia; and since the Utopia of every person who possesses one is unique that perhaps need not be regretted. We shall not even, within any measurable period of time, reach a sanely free and human life fit to satisfy quite moderate aspirations. ”

“ That greater scheme lies about the men and women I know, as I have tried to make the vistas and spaces, the mountains, cities, laws, and order of Utopia lie about my talking couple, too great for their sustained comprehension. ”

“ If we could not obtain Utopia then, we might, at least by abolishing the subnormals and abnormals who constitute the slaves and careerists of society, render the human race less contemptible and more divine. ”

“ Books like the "Utopia" are effective means of weakening the feeling of complete satisfaction with the existing social order, a state of mind which is neither helpful nor conducive to human betterment. ”

“ These modern Utopians with the universally diffused good manners, the universal education, the fine freedoms we shall ascribe to them, their world unity, world language, world-wide travellings, world-wide freedom of sale and purchase, will remain mere dreamstuff, incredible even by twilight, until we have shown that at that level the community will still sustain itself. ”

“ In fact, I wonder if, during man's history, he hasn't obtained his Utopias from time to time. Have you ever heard the adage that any form of government works fine and produces a Utopia provided it is managed by wise, benevolent and competent rulers? ”

“ But we are under the dominion of a logic that obliges us to take over the actual population of the world with only such moral and mental and physical improvements as lie within their inherent possibilities, and it is our business to ask what Utopia will do with its congenital invalids, its idiots and madmen, its drunkards and men of vicious mind, its cruel and furtive souls, its stupid people, too stupid to be of use to the community, its lumpish, unteachable and unimaginative people? ”

“ If the modern Utopia is indeed to be a world of responsible citizens, it must have devised some scheme by which every person in the world can be promptly and certainly recognised, and by which anyone missing can be traced and found. ”

“ In that intermediate region between the kindred heights and deeps those beginnings and promises will arise that are the essential significance, the essential substance, of life. From our human point of view the mountains and sea are for the habitable lands that lie between. So likewise the State is for Individualities. The State is for Individuals, the law is for freedoms, the world is for experiment, experience, and change: these are the fundamental beliefs upon which a modern Utopia must go. ”

“ With these sacred objects in view, whatever may be said to the contrary, we shall, in addition to the ineffable fruition of truth for its own sake, ever draw nearer to the ideal of the human race, and the time will come when an apparent Utopia shall be actually realized, in accordance with the mode and process of growing civilization. ”

“ A Utopia such as this present one, written in the opening of the Twentieth Century, and after the most exhaustive discussion—nearly a century long—between Communistic and Socialistic ideas on the one hand, and Individualism on the other, emerges upon a sort of effectual conclusion to those controversies. ”

“ We permit ourselves a free hand with the mental conflict of life, within the possibilities of the human mind as we know it. We permit ourselves also a free hand with all the apparatus of existence that man has, so to speak, made for himself, with houses, roads, clothing, canals, machinery, with laws, boundaries, conventions, and traditions, with schools, with literature and religious organisation, with creeds and customs, with everything, in fact, that it lies within man's power to alter. That, indeed, is the cardinal assumption of all Utopian speculations old and new ”

“ A Utopia, on the contrary, can be discussed like any other social constitution; the spontaneous movements it presupposes can be compared with the movements actually observed in the course of history, and we can in this way evaluate its verisimilitude; it is possible to refute Utopias by showing that the economic system on which they have been made to rest is incompatible with the necessary conditions of'modern production. ”

“ It is not by assimilation, that is to say, but by understanding that the modern Utopia achieves itself. The ideal community of man's past was one with a common belief, with common customs and common ceremonies, common manners and common formulæ; men of the same society dressed in the same fashion, each according to his defined and understood grade, behaved in the same fashion, loved, worshipped, and died in the same fashion. ”

“ It must be remembered that a modern Utopia must differ from the Utopias of any preceding age in being world-wide; it is not, therefore, to be the development of any special race or type of culture, as Plato's developed an Athenian-Spartan blend, or More, Tudor England. The modern Utopia is to be, before all things, synthetic. Politically and socially, as linguistically, we must suppose it a synthesis; politically it will be a synthesis of once widely different forms of government ”