Eric Weiner 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.

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

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

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 nonsense to say money doesn't buy happiness, but people exaggerate the extent to which more money can buy more happiness.

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?

If we were capable of thinking of everything, we would still be living in Eden, rent-free with all-you-can-eat buffets and infinitely better daytime TV programming.

Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache... Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.

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 believe that we have to strive for a transition to a socialist society ... all the way to communism. I mean I think we should, uh, I think we should all study what the word means and I believe that if everyone knew what the word meant we would all be on our knees praying that we would, as soon as possible, be able to live under, uh, within a communist structure.

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

If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there'd be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.

Utopia is that which is in contradiction with reality.

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

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.

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

Men cannot conceive of a state of things so fair that it cannot be realized.

I am a perfect being in a perfect world.

We are flawed creatures, all of us. Some of us think that means we should fix our flaws. But get rid of my flaws and there would be no one left.

There is no perfect man! I think I'm meant to have many soulmates.

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

I have no notions of a perfect society, I don’t know what that means. I know we can do much better than what we’ve got, I’m no utopian, I’m not a humanist that would like to see everybody living in warmth and harmony: I know that if we don’t live that way, we’ll kill each other and destroy the Earth.

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

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.