Margot Lee Shetterly Quotes

You don't build for the way people live, but for the way they should live. I don't write about people as they are, but as they could be and should be.

Also by my earliest days, I was fascinated by a utopian vision of what the world could be like. I've thought that science could be the basis for a better world, and that's what I've been trying to do all these years.

It is true that I am not one of those who laugh at utopias. The utopia of today can become the reality of tomorrow. Utopias are conceived by optimistic logic which regards constant social and political progress as the ultimate goal of human endeavor; pessimism would plunge a hopeless mankind into a fresh cataclysm.

I am a Utopian. What else would I be? I am living in America.

They [philosophers] conceive of men, not as they are, but as they themselves would like them to be

There is not a new hopeful, optimistic vision of the future that I am currently aware of. Certainly, not one that has penetrated pop culture awareness in the way 'Star Trek' has.

Well I believe in the desirability of an optimal society.

And I repeat: if there is anything that can divert the land of my birth from its current stampede into the Stone Age, it is the widespread dissemination of the thoughts and perceptions that Robert Heinlein has been selling as entertainment since 1939.

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.

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

In this life of ours we remain directed toward the relative utopia of a better world, and sensibly this can be the only model for our action.

There has never yet been a human society worthy of the name of civilization. Civilization remains a remote ideal.

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.

Progress is the realization of utopia.

Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache. They wanted to produce a perfect society by an endless continuation of something that had only been valuable because it was temporary. The wider course would be to say that there are certain lines along which humanity must move, the grand strategy is mapped out, but detailed prophecy is not our business. Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.

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 that which is in contradiction with reality.

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

People are the common denominator of progress; no improvement is possible with unimproved people.

Can we imagine a different world? I can. That's a world where work is rational, it's in the common good, and we're actually producing real things rather than spinning our wheels in dreams of consumer heaven.

I think that Utopia is a theory of human action.

Utopia is in the moment. Not in some future time, some other place, but in the here and now, or else it is nowhere.

I've always been really interested in the future, and I feel like all of the movies that I've been exposed to, over the course of the last 20 to 30 years, have shown me a future that I don't really want to be living in.