Fredric Jameson Quotes

Utopia is that which is in contradiction with reality.

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

Utopianism is all well and good if it proceeds from a courageous appreciation of the world as it actually exists

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

Utopias are presented for our inspection as a critique of the human state.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Philosophy first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to fit the world to it.

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

No Utopia is Utopia for everyone

I am a perfect being in a perfect world.

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.

Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.

Idealism leads to realism if it is strictly thought out.

Matter is simply a concept. The world is made of language.

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.

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

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

I think that Utopia is a theory of human action.