"Utopia" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... at the same time maintaining them to be an exact and veritable history. In the Middle Ages the legend seems to have been half-forgotten until revived by the discovery of America. It helped to form the Utopia of Sir Thomas More and the New Atlantis of Bacon, although probably neither of those great men were at all imposed upon by the fiction. It was most prolific in the seventeenth or in the early part of the eighteenth century, when the human mind, seeking for ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... treatise on government might lead us to expect in the Politics mainly a description of a Utopia or ideal state which might inspire poets or philosophers but have little direct effect upon political institutions. Plato's Republic is obviously impracticable, for its author had turned away in despair from existing politics. He has no proposals, in that dialogue ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle
... government, exploded by the sound sense of Burke; political generalizations like certain paragraphs of the French Declaration of Rights, every item of which now and here reads like a platitude but was then and there a vivid revolutionary novelty; emotional yearnings for some vague Utopia—all fell into fruitful soil and produced a rank harvest, mostly of straw and stalks, although there was some sound grain. The thought of the time was a powerful factor in determining the course and the quality of ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... Montana and Butte & Boston, after long delay, drew out of the "Standard Oil" station as the second section of Amalgamated, carrying an immense load of investors and speculators to what was at that time confidently believed would be Dollar Utopia; and the price of the enlarged Amalgamated fairly flew to 130. These were the stocks which I had originally advertised would be part of the first section of the consolidated "Coppers," and which, after Amalgamated ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... Palladium of the Constitution; but, at the same time, I hold the licentiousness of the press in the greatest abhorrence. Nobody is more conscious than I am of the splendid abilities of the Honourable Mover, but I tell him at once, his scheme is too good to be practicable. It savours of Utopia. It looks well in theory, but it won't do in practice. It will not do, I repeat, Sir, in practice; and so the advocates of the measure will find, if, unfortunately, it should find its way through Parliament. (Cheers.) The source of that corruption to ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... And a very charming ideal for England must she have been, and a very natural one, when a young girl sat even on the throne. But no nation can keep its ideal for ever, and it needed none of Mr. Gilbert's delicate satire in 'Utopia' to remind us that she had passed out of our ken with the rest of the early Victorian era. What writer of plays, as lately asked some pressman, who had been told off to attend many first nights and knew what he was talking about, ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... failure of my escapade, and I was as eager to run back as I had been to run away. Memories, touched by imagination, had come to naught in contact with reality. I learned my first lesson in keeping it and ideals in their proper place. A bird in the bush is worth two in the hand! Utopia is a far country, toward which to travel is better than to arrive. It was some years before I restored the Bellingham of my imagination. If experience be nothing but suffering then I had experienced; over this transaction therefore I grant ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... great Cardinal Merton, archbishop of Canterbury, and Lord High Chancellor, whose gravity and learning, generosity and tenderness, allured all men to love and honour him. To him More dedicated his Utopia, which of all his works is unexceptionably the most masterly and finished. The Cardinal finding himself too much incumbered with business, and hurried with state affairs to superintend his education, placed him in Canterbury College in Oxford, whereby his assiduous application to ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... to the atmosphere of mystery surrounding the wizard, opened the way for more notorious appeals to the popular taste for personal scandal. In the once well known "Memoirs of a Certain Island adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia" (1725-6) and the no less infamous "Secret History of the Present Intrigues of the Court of Carimania" (1727) Mrs. Haywood found a fit repertory for daringly licentious gossip of the sort made fashionable ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... the forty-fifth degree of latitude, and to forbid every one, excepting the tax-gatherers, to ask for money; it has labored hard to give to all the main roads a more or less substantial pavement—but none of these advantages of our fair Utopia is appreciated! The citizens want something else. They are not ashamed to demand the right of traveling over the roads at their own will, and of being informed where that money given to the tax-gatherers goes. And, finally, ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... good folk of Valleyview had no idea of how such a state of affairs could exist, to say nothing of how it could have come about, till one of the scientists whom they asked to join them as a part of the plan which they presently devised to make their forthcoming utopia self-sufficient, came up with a theory that ...
— The Servant Problem • Robert F. Young
... doctors' new names, disciples who have not burdened their souls with tape? Well, let us call again. Oh, Disraeli, great oppositionist, man of the bitter brow! or, Oh, Molesworth, great reformer, thou who promisest Utopia. They come; each with that serene face, and each,— alas, me! alas, my country!—each ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... have been talking it over, and have decided that some day you are to take us down to Pullman, the town founded by George Pullman. We have read a book about the town, and all about the philanthropist who laid it out, and made a little Utopia—I think that's the word—for the laboring men in his employ, where they have little brick houses made to fit a family, with gas and water. The book says he was a regular father to them, and we want to see ...
— Peck's Uncle Ike and The Red Headed Boy - 1899 • George W. Peck
... especially of Christianity, the ideal of a life beyond death being "diametrically opposed to the ideal of Bolshevism, which tempts the masses by promising the immediate realisation of the earthly paradise." And, Bolshevism's practical method for realising its Utopia being "the armed conflict of classes . . . the dream of the earthly paradise, to be brought into being through civil war, becomes instantly the reality of hell let loose." After dwelling in detail on various aspects ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... him carte blanche to put his theory into practice. In practical life however it was a failure—perhaps because he failed to allow for the strength or weakness of materials and instruments. His book is a Chinese [Page 129] Utopia, nearly akin to those of Plato and Sir ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... child of the Ghetto who believed the pen was more profitable than the pack. Ambition: The Promised Utopia. Recreation: Zangwell plays. Address: The ...
— Who Was Who: 5000 B. C. to Date - Biographical Dictionary of the Famous and Those Who Wanted to Be • Anonymous
... to attempt seriously any sexual reform. But, as the human subject is by nature extremely weak, as his views are limited, especially in the matter which concerns us, it is absolutely necessary, if we would avoid Utopia, to adapt the fundamental aim of sexual union to happiness and joy, even to ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... indeed, that the freedom of trade should ever be entirely restored in Great Britain, is as absurd as to expect that an Oceana or Utopia should ever be established in it. Not only the prejudices of the public, but, what is much more unconquerable, the private interests of many individuals, irresistibly oppose it. Were the officers of the army to oppose, with the same zeal ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... to see the past in a golden haze, which obscures our vision. Thus, we think of William Penn's "holy experiment" on the banks of the Delaware as the realization of Sir Thomas More's dream of Utopia; and yet Pennsylvania was somewhat intemperately called in 1698 "the greatest refuge for pirates and rogues in America," and Penn himself wrote, about that time, that he had heard of no place which was ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... course you must take up your profession as others have taken it up before you. Very many young men dream of a Themis fit for Utopia. You have slept somewhat longer than others, and your ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... "Of Utopia!" exclaimed Morris. "Hamilton, you are the least visionary man in this country, but you are God knows how many years ahead of your times. If we are ever on two legs again, you will put us there; but your golden locks will thin in the process, and that rosy ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... bull,—we may call them an endowed lay-clergy: they are told off from the rest of men to lead the way in doing, and causing to be done, the highest work of humanity. The absence of the First Class of Workers would render the Socialist Utopia a very ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... How could he? If he does half he says he will, he'll lose his job. The town would be as pure as Utopia, and there wouldn't be ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... things. When all the gaps in the memory are filled in, when all the puzzling operations of the psychological life are explained, then the continuance and the return of the suffering has become impossible. The attainment of this ideal state is truly the attainment of Utopia. Most certainly a treatment does not need to be carried so far. One may be satisfied with the practical cure of the patient, with the restoration of his power for work, and with the abolition of ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... come in a spirit of compromise," he returned. "We've differed widely on this question of a greater canal. You have evolved a plan best suited to Utopia; my own is aimed to meet the human nature I know best—the human nature De Witt Clinton, in whose steps you evidently aspire to tread, comprehended and took into the reckoning. Be practical as he was practical—as ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... in the court-room when Ruef's sentence was imposed. The Little Boss seemed oddly aged and nerveless; the old look of power was gone from his eyes. Frank recalled Ruef's plan of a political Utopia. The man had started with a golden dream, a genius for organization which might have achieved great things. But his lower self had conquered. He had sold his dream for gold. ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... publications were in sympathy, at first, with the Pontiff and his reforming ministry. They advocated only rational reform, real improvement, such changes as were both practicable and useful. They had not yet discovered the excellence of the Socialist utopia. Their enthusiasm and their vivats were all for the ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... discovered, however, that the future would not permit itself to be shelved in this offhand fashion; there were certain problems that persisted in thrusting themselves upon her notice with increasing frequency, and one of them was—marriage! The idea of creating a Utopia necessarily included that of establishing the home life and domestic happiness. There were two men in particular who forced her to give some thought to this detail, one of whom was Wilde, and the other an able seaman named Gurney—the latter quite as remarkable a man in his way as was Wilde in ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... it was (as he thought) to the heiress of a large estate. You could not expect him to encumber himself with a wife who brought him less than one year's income of his own. 'Tis not reasonable, child. No man in his senses would do such a thing. We live in the world, my dear,—not in Utopia." ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt
... unless it chanced that even as the Devil made a cobbler a mariner, he hath made him a Printer. Formerly this scoundrel did profess himself a Bookseller, as well skilled as if he had started forth from Utopia. He knows well that he is free who pretendeth to books, although it be nothing more.' This pretty little quarrel continued some time, and broke out with renewed vigour on one or two subsequent occasions; but the rivals ultimately became friends, and when Pynson retired ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... to render culture accessible to all—to break down that barrier which in the Middle Ages was set between clerk and layman, and which in the intermediate period has arisen between the intelligent and ignorant classes. Whether the Utopia of a modern world in which all men shall enjoy the same social, political, and intellectual advantages be realized or not, we cannot doubt that the whole movement of humanity, from the Renaissance onward, has tended in this direction. To destroy the distinctions, mental ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... endure the absurdities of a made-up theology and a make-believe religion: and the Utopia designed by Comte was as impracticable and unattractive as Utopias generally are. But the critical and destructive part of the case was sound enough. Here was a man who challenged the existing order of society and pronounced ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... The commonest criticism, indeed, of all projectors of new Utopias is that they propose a change of human nature. The criticism really suggests a sound criterion. Unless the change proposed be practicable, the Utopia will doubtless be impossible. And unless some practicable change be proposed, the Utopia, even were it embodied in practice, would be useless. If the sole result of raising wages were an increase in ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... the house, Ruth's first glance was at the hall table, but there was no important-looking yellow envelope to suggest that her cablegram had arrived. Then her eye fell on the evening paper; perhaps that might tell that the "Utopia" was safely in port. She started to turn to the shipping news, but her gaze was caught by a headline on the first page, and she stood rigid, holding the paper in her shaking hands and trying to make sense of what she ...
— Glenloch Girls • Grace M. Remick
... happy, high, majestical. Where is the love, beauty, and truth we seek, But in our mind? and if we were not weak 175 Should we be less in deed than in desire?' 'Ay, if we were not weak—and we aspire How vainly to be strong!' said Maddalo: 'You talk Utopia.' 'It remains to know,' I then rejoined, 'and those who try may find 180 How strong the chains are which our spirit bind; Brittle perchance as straw...We are assured Much may be conquered, much may be endured, Of what degrades and crushes ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... and acquaintance with continental art, but also from the very fact of her being an English wife and mother. Women ought, perhaps, always to make the best critics—at once more quicksighted, more tasteful, more sympathetic than ourselves, whose proper business is creation. Perhaps in Utopia they will take the reviewer's business entirely off our hands, as they are said to be doing already, by-the-bye, in one leading periodical. But of all critics an English matron ought to be the best—open as she should be, by her womanhood, to all tender and admiring ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... would be easy to multiply examples proving that as regards the material organization Fourier's dream was not a Utopia. ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... amused himself among the philosophers. "Let him keep his books of philosophy for some Tusculum idleness such as is this of ours, lest, when he shall have to speak of justice, he must go to Plato and borrow from him, who, when he had to express him in these things, created in his books some new Utopia."[247] For in truth, though Cicero deals much, as we shall see by-and-by, with the philosophers, and has written whole treatises for the sake of bringing Greek modes of thought among the Romans, he loved the affairs of the world too well to ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... single pursuit could have that attraction for its votaries which most pursuits in course of time establish. Thus legal authorities are usually jealous of innovations on legal principles. Thus it is described of the lawyer in the Introductory Discourse to the Description of Utopia, that he said of a proposal against Capital Punishment, "'this could never be so established in England but that it must needs bring the weal-public into great jeopardy and hazard', and as he was thus saying, he shaked his head, and made a wry mouth, and so he held his peace". ...
— Miscellaneous Papers • Charles Dickens
... airy flippancy, is the very leaven of modern life. It is remoulding the world for us and fashioning our age anew. If it is antediluvian, it is so because the deluge is yet to come; if it is Utopian, then Utopia must be added to our geographies. To what curious straits M. Caro is driven by his violent prejudices may be estimated by the fact that he tries to class George Sand's novels with the old Chansons de geste, the stories of adventure characteristic of primitive literatures; ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... University of Cambridge, where I shall take my degree of A. M. this term; but were reasoning, eloquence, or virtue, the objects of my search, Granta is not their metropolis, nor is the place of her situation an 'El Dorado,' far less an Utopia. The intellects of her children are as stagnant as her Cam, and their pursuits limited to the church—not of Christ, but ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... heart and soul responded to the call of Jesus, there would be a new heaven and a new earth—a Utopia such as More never dreamed of, nor Plato, nor Bellamy, nor Campanella in his City of the Sun. Each hand would be at its own work; each eye would be upon its own task; each foot would be in the right path. All the fear, the weariness, ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... sometimes called Nusquama) is a description, written in Latin, of an ideal commonwealth; in which More develops a number of very novel political ideas. The first book, which was written last, deals with the condition of England in his day; the description of Utopia occupying the second. ...
— Selections from Erasmus - Principally from his Epistles • Erasmus Roterodamus
... strange paradox of our moral nature, that, though the {168} pursuit of outward good is the breath of its nostrils, the attainment of outward good would seem to be its suffocation and death. Why does the painting of any paradise or Utopia, in heaven or on earth, awaken such yawnings for nirvana and escape? The white-robed harp-playing heaven of our sabbath-schools, and the ladylike tea-table elysium represented in Mr. Spencer's Data of Ethics, as the final consummation of progress, are exactly on a ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... constructions put upon this essay, not the least amusing and perverse is that which would make it a piece of adroit flattery to Elizabeth, who never permitted love "to check with business," though she is represented to have used it as a diversion in idle moments. If Sir Thomas More's 'Utopia' had been published a quarter of a century after 1518 (the date of its appearance), a similar construction would have been put on the passage, which urges that lovers should not be bound by an indissoluble ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... actually made the exploration more difficult for him. In fact, it was positively fraught with peril. But since Aladdin's Planet had become the galaxy's arsenal of plenty, it was well worth Purcell's effort. As any schoolboy knows in this utopia of 24th century plenty, Aladdin's Planet, almost exactly at the heart of the galaxy, where matter is spontaneously created to sweep out in long cosmic trails across the galaxy, is the home not merely of spontaneous creation of matter, but spontaneous ...
— A World Called Crimson • Darius John Granger
... there is nothing to shew that he had formed any distinct scheme of a government to take the place of that which he had aided in destroying. All we learn is, that there hovered in his mind's eye some vague Utopia, in which public affairs would go on very much of themselves, through the mere force of universal Benevolence, liberated from the bosom of Nature. For his folly and audacity in nourishing so wild a theory, and still more for the reckless ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 426 - Volume 17, New Series, February 28, 1852 • Various
... answered them naively that it was marriage; in the same way as in the place of priests who have so much compromised religion, I believe it is religion which ought to be put. . . . That love which I erect and crown over the ruins of the infamous, is my Utopia, my dream, my poetry. That love is grand, noble, beautiful, voluntary, eternal; but that love is marriage such as Jesus made it, such as Saint Paul explained it. This I ask of society as an innovation, as an institution lost in the night of ages, ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... be employed to oppose these visionary schemes. They must be publicly denounced as what they really are—as an unhealthy and feeble Utopia, or a cloak for political machinations. Our people must learn to see that the maintenance of peace never can or may be the goal of a policy. The policy of a great State has positive aims. It will endeavour ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... of those who had previously been distinguished by the freedom of their opinions. The violence of the democratic party in France made Burke a Tory and Alfieri a courtier. The violence of the chiefs of the German schism made Erasmus a defender of abuses, and turned the author of Utopia into a persecutor. In both cases, the convulsion which had overthrown deeply seated errors, shook all the principles on which society rests to their very foundations. The minds of men were unsettled. It seemed for a time that all order and morality were about to perish with ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... with an ironical smile, his eyes flashing malignantly, "has the charm of—what's one to call it?—geometrical symmetry, of clearness, of definiteness. It may be a Utopia. But if once one allows the possibility of making of all the past a tabula rasa—no property, no family— then labor would organize itself. But you ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... upon neutral ground, where we have no more knowledge of party difficulties, or public animosities between side and side, or between man and man, than if we were a public meeting in the commonwealth of Utopia. ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... press. Foreign men of letters visited England; Erasmus, especially, gave a strong impulse to study, and Greek and Latin were learned with an accuracy never before attained. Among the scholars of the time were Cardinals Pole and Wolsey, Ridley, Ascham, and Sir Thomas More, the author of the "Utopia," a romance in the scholastic garb. It describes an imaginary commonwealth, the chief feature of which is a community of property, on an imaginary island, from which the book takes its name. The epithet "Utopian" is still used as ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... that his village should admire him; his simple scheme of good in which everybody was to be happy—no beggar was to be refused his dinner—nobody in fact was to work much, and he to be the harmless chief of the Utopia, and the monarch of the Irish Yvetot. He would have told again, and without fear of their failing, those famous jokes(185) which had hung fire in London; he would have talked of his great friends of the Club—of ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... to them lands and cattle, supplied with all necessary equipment. By these gifts to the neglected gods, Horemheb was striving to bring Egypt back to its natural condition and with a strong hand he was guiding the country from chaos to order, from fantastic Utopia to the solid Egypt of the past. He was, in fact, the preacher of sanity, the ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... the evening for a touch of neuralgia, and it set my imagination at work in a way quite unusual with me. I had been reading a number of books about an ideal condition of society,—Sir Thomas Mores 'Utopia,' Lord Bacon's 'New Atlantis,' and another of more recent date. I went to bed with my brain a good deal excited, and fell into a deep slumber, in which I passed through some experiences so singular that, on awaking, I put them down on paper. I ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... no ambition was mingled. In that heated stage of action, in which the desire of power seemed to stir through every breast, and Italy had become the El Dorado of wealth, or the Utopia of empire, to thousands of valiant arms and plotting minds, there was at least one breast that felt the true philosophy of the Hermit. Adrian's nature, though gallant and masculine, was singularly imbued with that elegance ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... their strange adventure, the beauty, the thrill, the romance of it. It had brought out in them every instinct of chivalry and kindness, it had developed in them every tendency towards high-mindedness and idealism. Angel Island would be an Atlantis, an Eden, an Arden, an Arcadia, a Utopia, a Milleamours, a Paradise, the Garden of Hesperides. Into it the Golden Age would come again. They drew glowing pictures of the wonderful friendships that would grow up on Angel Island between them ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... a spur to Engels' faculties which certainly never showed to better advantage than in that work. A portion of the argument, in fact an abstract of the general train of reasoning, with the omission of the more obviously controversial parts, has been reprinted under the title of "Socialism from Utopia to Science." The following quotation is taken from the translation prepared for the "People" ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... Englishman, what Frenchman, would wish to be a Swiss? A commercial republic is but an admirable machine for making money. Is man created for nothing nobler than freighting ships and speculating on silk and sugar? In fact, there is no certain goal in legislation; we go on colonizing Utopia, and fighting phantoms in the clouds. Let us content ourselves with injuring no man, and doing good only in our own little sphere. Let us leave States and senates to fill the sieve of the Danaides, and roll ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VI • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book-friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness. The things I have learned and the things I have been taught seem of ridiculously little ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... before they had sailed away from San Francisco in a wretched old crate of a schooner, named the Percy Edward (an ex-Tahitian mail packet), to seek for an island or islands whereon they were to found a Socialistic Utopia, where they were to pluck the wild goat by the beard, pay no rent to the native owners of the soil, and, letting their hair grow down their backs, lead an idyllic life and loaf around generally. Such a mad ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... of his last books Donnelly presages later futurist works such as "Brave New World" and "1984". The original scans and OCR were provided by Mr. J.B. Hare; for further information about Donnelly and this book see http://www.sacred-texts.com/utopia/cc/index.htm. There is only one footnote ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... "of which a journey to an Utopia, in the centre of Africa, forms the chief part, called The Adventures of Signor Gaudentio di Lucca, has been commonly ascribed to him; probably on no other ground than its union of pleasing invention with benevolence and elegance."—Works, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 64, January 18, 1851 • Various
... centuries, and it is impossible to utter it without feeling something of their pressure and their strain. The very existence of the "grand style" is a protest against any false views of "progress" and "evolution." Man may alleviate his lot in a thousand directions; he may build up one Utopia after another; but the grand style will still remain; will remain as the ultimate expression of those aspects of his life that ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... independence of Peru: I have ceased to be a public man!" He died at Boulogne, France, in poverty, after nearly thirty years of exiled and fameless life. His career seems like that of some hero of fiction, such as the imagination of a Plato, a Bacon, or a Sir Thomas More might create for an Utopia. He is the one perfectly unselfish man in history, and his fame has grown steadily in Spanish America, since Argentina built a tomb-palace for his remains, and decreed for him one of the most splendid funerals ever known ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... to labor for the Commonwealth,' which may serve as an Appendix to this, and in which all the particulars requisite may be directed: and as experience will, from time to time, be pointing out amendments, these may be made without touching this fundamental act. See More's Utopia pa. 50, for some good hints. Fugitives might, in such a bill, be obliged to work two days for every ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... poet has proved that his visions are true, and that he is eager to bring society into harmony with them, what further charge remains against him? That he is "an ineffectual angel, beating his bright wings in the void." He may see a vision of Utopia, and long that men shall become citizens there, but the man who actually perfects human society is he who patiently toils at the "dim, vulgar, vast, unobvious work" [Footnote: See Sordello.] of the world, here amending a law, here building ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... and most bestial in this miserable, misguided people struggling for Utopia and Liberty, seemed to come to the surface, whilst listening to the reading ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... indeed how anyone could fail to find all their dreams realised in so secluded, so monastic a Utopia. ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... dreams," raising his voice. "I have a real plan for you and me, lad. I have found the Utopia of the prophets and poets, an actual place, here in Pennsylvania. We will go there together, shut out the trade-world, and devote ourselves with these lofty enthusiasts to a life of purity, celibacy, meditation,—helpful and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... he has proved it to the satisfaction of the scientific world. When he applies it to sociology our Bellamys are looking backward to Sir Thomas More, and expect a sudden transformation to a Utopia, not unlike the change which the good old preachers used to tell us we would experience "in the twinkling ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... what was intended to represent the exterior of a hotel at Monte Carlo. It more nearly resembled the materialization of a dope fiend's dream of an opium factory. What might have been a bank building in Utopia, an old Spanish galleon in drydock, or the exterior of a German beer garden according to the cover of Vogue occupied the center of the scene. The bricks were violet and old gold, sprayed with tomato juice and marked by the indeterminate silver tracks of ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... League of Nations will be formed, and will be capable of performing this task, it is as yet impossible to foretell. However that may be, some method of preventing wars will have to be established before our Utopia becomes possible. When once men BELIEVE that the world is safe from war, the whole difficulty will be solved: there will then no longer be any serious resistance to the disbanding of national armies and navies, and ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... reasonable. And to become reasonable ... Well, revolution does not thrive on reason. It needs something more active. You, Mathilde, were a revolutionist in Berlin. Now you are a stenographer. Alas! one collapses under a load of dream and finds one's self in an uninteresting Utopia, if that means anything. Epigrams lie around the street corners of Munich ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... reign. From the time that Louis-Philippe accepted the throne in 1830, until June the 6th, 1832, a number of young men in the different colleges at Paris occupied themselves constantly with the affairs of the state, each forming a sort of political utopia, and however different were their various theories, they all united in one object, and that was to overthrow the existing government, and secretly took measures for arming themselves, and mustering what strength they could collect in point of numbers, which was but very insignificant compared ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... Thomas More, that early socialist—imagine his elation! For he will regard our desire to transfer some of his own credit to the man in the pre-Elizabethan street as a sure sign that we are steadily approaching the golden gates of his Utopia. For good Sir Thomas knows that our view of heroes and hero-worship has always been too little democratic. We have been over-inclined, with the aristocratic Carlyle, to see all history as a procession of a few transcendent masters surrounded, preceded, and followed by enormous herds ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... desired to see. Near St. Paul's he stopped in front of an old book-shop. His grave, pallid, not unhandsome face, was well-known to William Rimall, its small proprietor, who at once brought out his latest acquisition—a Mores 'Utopia.' That particular edition (he assured Miltoun) was quite unprocurable—he had never sold but one other copy, which had been literally, crumbling away. This copy was in even better condition. It could hardly last another ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Utopia is charming, and the quasi-scientific detail of the expedition is given with so much integrity that we hardly wonder at ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... Sinclair, "these wretched fools thought my organization was a utopia until they learned that I was no better for them than the Solar Guard. Unfortunately they learned too late and were sent here to dig underground pits for my ...
— The Revolt on Venus • Carey Rockwell
... denunciation of intolerance the Latitudinarians passed easily to the dream of comprehension which had haunted every nobler soul since the "Utopia" of More. Hales based his loyalty to the Church of England on the fact that it was the largest and the most tolerant Church in Christendom. Chillingworth pointed out how many obstacles to comprehension were removed ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... moreover, that their conception is not a Utopia, constructed on the a priori method, after a few desiderata have been taken as postulates. It is derived, they maintain, from an analysis of tendencies that are at work already, even though state socialism may find a temporary favour with the reformers. The progress ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... deem it a matter of duty to exult over the ruin of our republican edifice. Fear actuates the less enlightened; jealousy is the motive of the more liberal. A celebrated statesman once said to me, "A republic is theoretically a very fine thing, but it is a Utopia." Like the man in antiquity, who, on hearing motion denied, refuted the assertion simply by rising and walking, we had hitherto put the "Utopia" into practice; and the thing did march on, and proved a reality. The argument was peremptory. A principle ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... knowing somewhat your desires and aspirations, have drawn a plan, which you in your wisdom can modify, improve, perfect. In this I know we are of one mind, that though the ideal we all of us hold be never reached during our lives, we shall continue to work successfully for its realisation. Utopia itself is but another word for time; and some day the masses, who now heed us not, or smile incredulously at our proceedings, will awake to our conceptions. Then our knowledge, like light rapidly conveyed from one torch to another, will bury ...
— Hygeia, a City of Health • Benjamin Ward Richardson
... the work better than that of a German critic, who sees in the book a sort of Utopia, a model community, or an exhibition in the development of law and order. Free love led to license, maids were ravished, and the complete promiscuity of intercourse disgusted Pine, who sought to suppress it by force and, in killing the leader of ...
— The Isle Of Pines (1668) - and, An Essay in Bibliography by W. C. Ford • Henry Neville
... said that experiments have not shown the doctrines of Fourier to be impracticable. The best thinkers have not lost their faith, and the example of M. Godin at Guise in France, with a population of 1,800 in the Social Palace enjoying the very Utopia of happy and prosperous co-operative life, is a splendid demonstration of what is possible, and a standing rebuke to the churches of civilized nations which have not even noticed this grand demonstration of the possibilities ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... on the subject, which, for the time, nothing could dispel. I had some poetic or imaginary fancy of spiritual catholicity before my mind, which I supposed was something better than the fleshy spirituality of Methodism, to which I had taken a great dislike; but where to find this Utopia, or how to embody it, I knew not. These specimens of catholic people I certainly had no sympathy with; nor had I any patience with their hollow devotion and their studied imitation of Popery. I plainly saw that light could have no fellowship with darkness, ...
— From Death into Life - or, twenty years of my ministry • William Haslam
... sacred objects in view, whatever may be said to the contrary, we shall, in addition to the ineffable fruition of truth for its own sake, ever draw nearer to the ideal of the human race, and the time will come when an apparent Utopia shall be actually realized, in accordance with the mode and process of growing civilization. Not by excesses, tumults, and folly, but by unshaken firmness and tenacity we shall promote science and freedom. If this modest essay has done anything to show the necessity of such culture, and in ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... But this is an Utopia! Is it? No; but the practicable object of those who know our resources! To seek it is the solemn, unavoidable duty of every Irishman. Whether, then, oh reader, you spend this or any coming season abroad or at home, do not forget for a day how much ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... come tidings of calamity after calamity, like the messages of disaster in the Book of Job, and as the world crumbles, people tend more and more to lay up their treasure elsewhere. In the Laws, Plato places his utopia no farther away than Crete. Two centuries later the followers of Aristonikos the Bolshevik, outlawed by the cities of Greece and Asia, proclaim themselves citizens of the City of the Sun. Two centuries later still, the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, despairing ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... regarded as the 'captain' ('arhchegoz') or leader of a goodly band of followers; for in the Republic is to be found the original of Cicero's De Republica, of St. Augustine's City of God, of the Utopia of Sir Thomas More, and of the numerous other imaginary States which are framed upon the same model. The extent to which Aristotle or the Aristotelian school were indebted to him in the Politics has been little recognised, and the recognition is the more necessary because it ...
— The Republic • Plato
... with pride and resolve, I felt that it was a mad dream, and that we were wicked not to wake him. For I, who loved him like a son, understood what it meant to him. In his talk along the trail and by the camp-fire he had always dreamed of an impossible republic, an Utopia ruled by love and justice, and I now saw he believed that the dreams had at last come true. I knew that the offer these men had made to follow him, filled him with a great happiness and gratitude. And that he, who all his life had ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... incipientent drunkenness. The same handsome treatment which the judge commended, had been as freely tendered him, yet he saw the end of all such hospitality. This was the worm in the bud. The judge, however, was an eager idealist; he still dreamed of Utopia, he still believed in millenniums. Mahaffy didn't and couldn't. Memory was the scarecrow in the garden of his hopes—you could wear out your welcome anywhere. In the end the world reckoned your cost, and unless you ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... have supposed an Atlantis or Utopia, we also may not suppose an Hyperborean island ...
— The Querist • George Berkeley
... of the "clean sweep" is one which both history and psychology condemn. But it does seem to me a good thing to envisage clearly, if we can, the ideal towards which our changes should lead. A garden city is not Utopia. Still, it is an advance upon the Victorian type of suburb and slum; and we should not have got it if some men had not believed in Utopia, and tried to make a beginning here and now. Already in education some few have tried to make such a beginning and have proved ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... war, if we were to restore international law as it must be restored, we must find some way in which the united forces of the nations could be put behind the cause of peace and law. I said then that my hearers might think that I was picturing a Utopia, but it is in the search of Utopias that great discoveries are made. Not failure, but low aim, is the crime. This league certainly has the highest of all aims for the benefits of humanity, and because the pathway is sown with difficulties is no reason that ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... White, who refused to rob from women and children; Captain Bellamy, the proletarian revolutionist; and captain North, whose sense of justice and honesty was a rebuke to the corruption of government under Walpole. But the fictional Captain Misson, the founder of a communist utopia, is by far the most original of ...
— Of Captain Mission • Daniel Defoe
... correspond to the digestive processes of the body, on which depend the proper nutrition of all the parts and the real prosperity of the State as a whole; yet any comprehensive plan for their control is still regarded as the most unattainable dream of Utopia, and they are left to carry on as best they can in the interstices of private acquisitiveness. National well-being is not to be measured by mere volume of trade, which is the means and not the essence of prosperity;[22] and prosperity can certainly never exist when equitable distribution ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... appears to be by no means on the decrease." "These emigrants of the present day consist not as formerly of poor people of the lower orders, who turn their backs on the German fatherland, or liberal declaimers, dreaming of an ideal of freedom which could scarcely be realized in Utopia, but of sober excellent families of the middle class, who, free from all delusive fancies, do not expect to find in the western world wealth and honorable offices, but desire only to inhabit a land, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... America, for a Pacific naval station. There are 200,000 acres of productive soil on the islands, of which only a fifteenth is under cultivation, and of this large area 150,000 is said to be specially adapted for sugar culture. Herein is a prospective Utopia, and people are always dreaming of the sugar- growing capacities of the belt of rich disintegrated lava which slopes upwards from the sea to the bases of the mountains. Hitherto, sugar growing has been a very disastrous ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... such a vast scale, and with such a free hand. We're laying the framework for a city of ten millions, all thoroughly systematized and efficient. There is no city in the world like it; it's an engineer's dream of Utopia." ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... tickled by a surgeon, when he's letting 'em blood.' Something more than a half-truth is in Charles Lamb's theory, that the old comedy 'has no reference whatever to the world that is': that it is 'the Utopia of Gallantry' merely. Literally, historically, the theory is a fantasy. What the Restoration dramatists did not borrow from France was inspired directly by the court of Charles the Second, and nobody ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... are anxious to do what is best for themselves and least harmful for others. The average man now has intelligence enough: Utopia is not far off, if the self-appointed folk who rule us, and teach us for a consideration, would only be willing to do unto others as they would be done by, that is to say, mind their own business and cease coveting things that belong to other people. War among nations ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard |
