Lois Lowry Quotes

The beauty of dystopia is that it lets us vicariously experience future worlds - but we still have the power to change our own.

The community of the Giver had achieved at such great price. A community without danger or pain. But also, a community without music, color or art. And books.

All of my work has been about ideas of utopia and dystopia. I think that's what gives America interest. It's many things all at once. It's such a complicated society.

Comedy can always be taken the wrong way. If I do a bit that is meant to diffuse racism or sexism, I'm not going to avoid it on the chance that a small portion of the audience might take it the wrong way.

Utopia means elsewhere.

The ideal society has yet to be built - one which balances nicely collective well-being and individual well-being.

. . . the newspapers of Utopia, he had long ago decided, would be terribly dull.

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

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

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

When I started acting in the film industry when I was 16 years old, in 1980, I was going to all the revival theaters in Los Angeles. They were playing mostly films from the '60s and '70s, some from the early '20s and '30s, before that Hays commission. Those films did question things a lot, and there definitely was a switch in 1934. You can see very distinctly in 1934, it's harder to understand what the real culture was. Films made before 1934, you can really kind of see the racism, sexism, drug use, etc. that was going on at that time. And then it was all stopped.

Ideal society is a drama enacted exclusively in the imagination.

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.

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

Utopia was here at last: its novelty had not yet been assailed by the supreme enemy of a ll Utopias - boredom.

There will be no end to the troubles of states,Or of humanity itself,Till philosophers become kings in this world,Or till those we now call kings and rulers really And truly become philosophers

Utopia is that which is in contradiction with reality.

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

I think that Utopia is a theory of human action.

You know how screwed up censorship is, two girls just agreed to make out naked in front of their fathers, and we went wait, don't curse.

We find the vast majority of people in every country believing that there will be a time when this world will become perfect, when there will be no disease, nor death, nor unhappiness, nor wickedness. That is a very good idea, a very good motive power to inspire and uplift the ignorant. But if we think for a moment, we shall find on the very face of it that it cannot be so. How can it be, seeing that good and evil are the obverse and reverse of the same coin? How can you have good without evil at the same time?

...heaven for climate, and hell for society.

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

Every Iranian artist, in one form or another, is political. Politics have defined our lives.

if we don't begin by imagining the perfect society, how shall we create one?