Harold Evans Quotes

Political utopias are a form of nostalgia for an imagined past projected onto the future as a wish.

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

Utopia would seem to offer the spectacle of one of those rare phenomena whose concept is indistinguishable from its reality, whose ontology coincides with its representation.

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.

What we need most, is not so much to realize the ideal as to idealize the real.

The willingness to be self-critical in England is much greater than the willingness to be self-critical in America.

I've always tried to write about America. It's very worth a writer's effort.

If you want to learn about America, watch 'The Wire.' It's a profound piece of entertainment.

And did the Countenance Divine Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here Among these dark Satanic mills?

Utopianism is all well and good if it proceeds from a courageous appreciation of the world as it actually exists

the greatest American superstition was belief in facts.

There is no country in the world where the process of self-criticism and self-correction is more active than in the United States.

I want no criticism of America at my table. The Americans criticize themselves more than enough.

… utopianism is probably a necessary social device for generating the superhuman efforts without which no major revolution is achieved.

With 'Utopia,' definitely it's more the idea of trying to put across a message rather than just entertaining the audience. It's entertaining as well, but there's also a lot of other things that are going on.

That's what 'Star Trek' was: We don't know how to make an ideal society, but we're going to portray that, and then we're going to work backward. I think that's why science fiction - despite the dystopian parts - comes out of this super ideal that, eventually, we will get to some better place where we actually live up to our ideals.

America is a country in which I see the most persistant idealism and the blandest of cynicism and the race is on between its vitality and its decadence.

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.

Utopia lies at the horizon. When I draw nearer by two steps, it retreats two steps. If I proceed ten steps forward, it swiftly slips ten steps ahead. No matter how far I go, I can never reach it. What, then, is the purpose of utopia? It is to cause us to advance.

America is one long expectoration.

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

Utopia is that which is in contradiction with reality.

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