Emil Cioran Quotes

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

When you make a company, you make a utopia. It's where you design your perfect world.

....This world needs Utopias as it needs fairy stories. It does not matter so much where we are going, as long as we are making consciously for some definite goal. And a Utopia, however strange or fanciful, is the only possible beacon upon the uncharted seas of the distant future.

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

The belief in a political Utopia is especially dangerous. This is possibly connected with the fact that the search for a better world, like the investigation of our environment, is (if I am correct) one of the oldest and most important of all the instincts.

No Utopia is Utopia for everyone

I am a perfect being in a perfect world.

In a perfect world perhaps we would all see more clearly. But this is not a perfect world, and it is enough to hope that each of us will share our talents, and find the balance between greed and benevolence that will allow us to live and thrive and help the world around us grow.

Ideal society is a drama enacted exclusively in the imagination.

Melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.

I love playing. If it was down to just that, it would be utopia.

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

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

The isolation, the separateness, is always a part of any utopia.

We live in the best of all possible worlds

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.

Hope is but a charlatan that ceases not to deceive us. For myself happiness only began when I had lost it.

Suppose a nation in some distant region should take the Bible for their only law book, and every member should regulate his conduct by the precepts there exhibited. What a Utopia! What a paradise this region would be.

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.

Could we perfect human nature, we might also expect a perfect state of things.

I am very optimistic about the long run prospects for democracy in China. Chinese society is being dramatically and rapidly transformed. And there’s rising evidence that the new generation not only lacks faith in communism anymore, they think it’s a joke. They’re very cynical about their leadership and they want democratic change.

Cynicism, disillusionment, and a dispiriting sense of purposeless has cast a shadow over American society seriously draining it of any language or vision that might imagine a different sort of society from the dysfunctional, militarizing, and deeply unequal social order that marked the current historical period.

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

I'm not going to wear rose-colored glasses when it comes to Russia, or Mr. Putin.