Russell Kirk Quotes

The attempt to make heaven on earth invariably produces hell.

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

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.

Each of us has heaven and hell in him.

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.

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

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.

It's a heartening fact about the human race that utopian fiction precedes dystopian fiction in the evolution of literature.

If you actually succeed in creating a utopia, you've created a world without conflict, in which everything is perfect. And if there's no conflict, there are no stories worth telling - or reading!

There is no heaven on Earth. Not now anyway.

Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art.

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?

Some people consider utopia to be derived from nature. For some people, utopia is the city.

Paradise is too perfect for humanity.

Stories in which the destruction of society occurs are explorations of social fears and issues that filmmakers, novelists, playwrights, painters have been examining for a long time.

In my mind, we live in Heaven, and we live in Hell.

The will is a beast of burden. If God mounts it, it wishes and goes as God wills; if Satan mounts it, it wishes and goes as Satan wills; Nor can it choose its rider... the riders contend for its possession.

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

I think what's so brilliant about 'Black Mirror' is that it is a mirror into our own messed-up psyches.

Be vary wary of people who declare that they're going to create heaven on earth, they almost invariably create hell.

According to the Bible, God created the heavens and the Earth. It is man’s prerogative - and woman’s - to create their own particular and private hell.

In a better world we will find our young years and our old friends.

Utopia is on the horizon. I move two steps closer; it moves two steps further away. I walk another ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps further away. As much as I may walk, I'll never reach it. So what's the point of utopia? The point is this: to keep walking.

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