Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

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

I think that Utopia is a theory of human action.

There's no perfect place, there's no wonderful utopia.

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

The world is imperfect, and young people are always trying to perfect it and they always fail - which is a good thing. Who'd want to live in a perfect world?

The effort of building an ideal society always leads to violence, often to very extensive violence. Because, whether we like it or not, it is not possible to create an ideal society with imperfect people. And this, unfortunately, we are. So the main purpose for Nazism as well as for Communism was to create a 'new person'. In order to make room for it, the world needed to be rid of its non-perfect models.

Our business here is to be Utopian, to make vivid and credible, if we can, first this facet and then that, of an imaginary whole and happy world.

Happiness is the chief material also in the construction of Utopias.

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

Utopia was here at last: its novelty had not yet been assailed by the supreme enemy of a ll Utopias - boredom.

Life without utopia is suffocating, for the multitude at least: threatened otherwise with petrifaction, the world must have a new madness.

Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.

Every utopia - let's just stick with the literary ones - faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don't fit in?

It's a heartening fact about the human race that utopian fiction precedes dystopian fiction in the evolution of literature.

Why have we had to invent Eden, to live submerged in the nostalgia of a lost paradise, to make up utopias, propose a future for ourselves?

… utopian social engineering

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

Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program… I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from.

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.

Without the Utopians of other times, men would still live in caves, miserable and naked. It was Utopians who traced the lines of the first City.....Out of generous dreams come beneficial realities. Utopia is the principle of all progress, and the essay into a better future.

Utopias are boring. Distopias on the other hand, are interesting.

The word "utopia" has two meanings. It means both "good place" and "nowhere". That's the way it should be. The happiest places, I think, are the ones that reside just this side of paradise. The perfect person would be insufferable to live with; likewise, we wouldn't want to live in the perfect place, either. "A life time of happiness! No man could bear it: It would be hell on earth," wrote George Bernard Shaw, in his play Man and Superman.

When you make a company, you make a utopia. It's where you design your perfect world.

As I’m fond of saying, if you want to find utopia, take a sharp right on money and a sharp left on sex and it’s straight ahead.

The ideal of perfect Success is an ideal belonging to the same sort of individual as the inventor of Equal Rights of man and Perfectibility.