Nadine Gordimer Quotes

Be vary wary of people who declare that they're going to create heaven on earth, they almost invariably create hell.

The attempt to make heaven on earth invariably produces hell.

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

Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.

Paradise is too perfect for humanity.

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.

I see only the ideal. But no ideals have ever been fully successful on this earth.

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.

Utopia is that which is in contradiction with reality.

Paradise does not exist, but we must nonetheless strive to be worthy of it.

I am a perfect being in a perfect world.

Maybe life on earth could be heaven, doesn't just the thought of it make it worth a try?

And then what?" said her daemon sleepily. "Build what?" "The Republic of Heaven," said Lyra.

The Golden Age is the most implausible of all dreams. But for it men have given up their life and strength; for the sake of it prophets have died and been slain; without it the people will not live and cannot die.

Nobody here could ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up. Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst: you didn't love a pose, a pretty dress, a sentiment artfully assumed.

Let's build Paradise again.

All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in.

Imagine if you succeeded in making the world perfect for your children what a shock the rest of life would be for them.

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

We cannot make a heaven on earth, though we may make a hell.

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

I've always been a writer, actually. Not many people assume that, but I kinda keep quiet about anything that I do until I'm ready to show it. It keeps me humble and also makes me work towards a goal.

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

I think that Utopia is a theory of human action.