Karl Popper Quotes

Until politics are a branch of science we shall do well to regard political and social reforms as experiments rather than short-cuts to the millennium.

I think my novel, 'Walden Two,' has made people stop and look at the culture they have inherited and wonder if it is the last word or whether it can be changed.

What I have been trying to do is indict the entire vision of progressivism.

Utopias have their value -- nothing so wonderfully expands the imaginative horizons of human potentialities -- but as guides to conduct they can prove literally fatal.

Communism was meant to be an alternative religion.

A radical generally meant a man who thought he could somehow pull up the root without affecting the flower. A conservative generally meant a man who wanted to conserve everything except his own reason for conserving anything.

Science fiction has traditionally been economically naive, with a strong libertarian streak, which I think is like a crude Leninism. That's attractive because it could be used to explain everything, and if only we lived by its tenets, everything would be perfect.

I have the greatest sympathy with the growth of the socialist party. I think they understand the evils that surround us and hammer them into people's minds better than we Liberals.

The commune movement is part of a reawakening of belief in the possibilities for utopia that existed in the nineteenth century and exist again today, a belief that by creating the right social institution, human satisfaction and growth can be achieved.

I am a conservative to preserve all that is good in our constitution, a radical to remove all that is bad.

Churchill and Hitler are striving to change the nature of their respective countrymen by forcing and hammering violent methods on them. Man may be suppressed in this manner but he cannot be changed.

The worst enemy of the new radicals are the old liberals.

Socialism was embraced by the greater part of the intelligentsia as the apparent heir of the liberal tradition: therefore it is not surprising that to them the idea of socialism's leading to the opposite of liberty should appear inconceivable.

All political action aims at either preservation or change.

Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative

Liberal Republicanism has kept this party abreast of human need in a changing world.

I am having nothing to do with this so-called civil rights bill. The liberal left-wingers have passed it. Now let them employ some pinknik social engineers in Washington, D.C., to figure out what to do with it.

Before the Second World War, I believed in the perfectability of social man; that a correct structure of society produced goodwill; and that, therefore, you could remove all social ills by a reorganisation of society. It is possible that I believe something of the same again; but after the war, I did not because I was unable to.

Utopias are presented for our inspection as a critique of the human state.

According to the politics of fantasy, mankind is on the verge of perfectibility, if only we give the government just a little bit more money and power.

One advantage of not being in power is that we can dream of reshaping the world exactly as we please.

I'm a utopianist.

We cannot set up, out of our heads, something we regard as an ideal society.

Utopias rest on the fallacy that perfection is a legitimate goal of human existence.

The avowed aim of all utopian movements is to put an end to history and to establish a final and permanent calm.