I was born in 1988, one year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and people of my generation were taught that utopian dreams are dangerous.
Liberation is an ever shifting horizon, a total ideology that can never fulfill its promises. It has the therapeutic quality of providing emotionally charged rituals of solidarity in hatred - it is the amphetamine of its believers.
I have argued that the Soviet story is one of the interaction of speculative excess or utopian aspirations with refractory reality.
I think it's fascinating to look at a world that an author has created that has sort of stemmed from the world now, and usually dystopian books point out something about our current world and exaggerates a tendency or a belief.
I spent my youth reading books in which corporations became governments, it's an old idea in science fiction.
The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.
Idealism, unrealistic idealism, is always contrasted with the reality of the people, of the man in the street. The details of daily life are always more convincing than the political fantasies of the earlier generations.
At times of general malaise and social breakdown, it is not uncommon for … movements to arise to replace lost hopes by idle dreams: dreams of a savior who will lead us from bondage …. Some may yearn for a lost golden age, or succumb to the blandishments of the new Messiahs who come to the fore at such moments.
As far as I am concerned, Don Quixote is the most metal fictional character that I know. Single handed, he is trying to change the world, regardless of any personal consequences.
Every time I've talked about the Republic of Gilead, I always say, 'The still-fictional Republic of Gilead.'
Communism is not immortal; it is impossible. It doesn’t work.
Sometimes idealism and all that make believe makes the world a better place.
We not only romanticize the future; we have also made it into a growth industry, a parlor game and a disaster movie all at the same time.
If utopian fiction became the new trend, I wouldn't read it.
If you live under a system that claims to have high ideals but seems ineradicably opposed to your own people's flourishing, the desire for idealistic reform within the system has to coexist with an openness to more radical possibilities.
My father was a socialist, so we had some of the most extraordinary people at home.
If the world were good for nothing else, it is a fine subject for speculation.
I know these are going to sound like school reading-list suggestions, but if you like dystopian fiction, you should check out some of the originals: 'Anthem,' by Ayn Rand; '1984,' by George Orwell; or 'Brave New World,' by Aldous Huxley.
One senses that all the Bolsheviks, even those who ended up as cold-blooded autocrats, had been on a journey from idealism to something else, and didn't notice - to mix periods - when the Rubicon was crossed.
All history is man's efforts to realize ideals.
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.
Those who dream of the joys of living in a space colony should live in a space colony.
My social and political interests are part of my career. I cannot separate them. My songs reflect the human condition. The role of art isn't just to show life as it is, but to show life as it should be.
All my movies are about people with some ideology, but guess what? It never works out.
Ideals are the world's masters.
