Hendrik Willem Van Loon Quotes

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.

Every year, something happens, and it turns me in a direction about where I need to go and what I need to do to give these guys direction.

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

If you cry 'forward', you must without fail make plain in what direction to go.

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 a vision the people perish.

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.

Things should all be moving toward the expression of a great idea.

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

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?

The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.

The only fruitful promise of which the life of any individual or any nation can be possessed, is a promise determined by an ideal.

Everything about my politics has been about the future.

I remember being young in the 1960s... we had a great sense of the future, a great big hope. This is what is missing in the youth today. This being able to dream and to change the world.

Where there is no vision, there is no hope.

Followers need to see how things will get better and what that future might look like. Leaders need to build that foundation of stability, and hope sits on top of that.

I was brought up in a family of leaders, and I think leadership is a life sentence. I like changing things that will shape the future.

Utopia means elsewhere.

Directions are instructions given to explain how. Direction is a vision offered to explain why.

If one has no compass, when one doesn't know where one stands and where one wants to go, one can deduce that one has no leadership or interest in shaping events.

What's missing from the world is a sense of direction.

To me, politics is about the future.

Direction is more important than speed. You can go fast in the wrong direction.

I'm tired of talking about where we've been. I'm more interested in talking about where we're going.