Margaret Atwood Quotes

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

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

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

No Utopia is Utopia for everyone

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

....This world needs Utopias as it needs fairy stories. It does not matter so much where we are going, as long as we are making consciously for some definite goal. And a Utopia, however strange or fanciful, is the only possible beacon upon the uncharted seas of the distant future.

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.

Utopia is something that I think about in connection to an experience I had when I was a kid.

You don't have to go very far away from Scandinavia to realize what an idyllic society it is.

For other nations, utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is just beyond the horizon.

All of my work has been about ideas of utopia and dystopia. I think that's what gives America interest. It's many things all at once. It's such a complicated society.

Society is better off without certain people.

A lot of people believe that if everybody just did what they were told - obeyed - everything would be fine. But that's not what life is all about. That's not real. It's never going to happen.

I'm afraid that reason will triumph and that the world will become a place where anyone who doesn't fit that will become unnecessary.

If you actually succeed in creating a utopia, you've created a world without conflict, in which everything is perfect. And if there's no conflict, there are no stories worth telling - or reading!

The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal.

Utopia means elsewhere.

Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society…

Poets are always making waves. I mean, you know, in an ideal situation, the ideal republic can't tolerate poets because - it isn't that they mutter and criticize; it is that the poet does not accept the situation called the 'perfect' condition of man - in other words, perfect in the materialistic sense.

How would I myself live in this proposed society? How long would it be before I went stark staring mad?

The ideal society has yet to be built - one which balances nicely collective well-being and individual well-being.