Idealists and reformers all become executioners in their turn. The road to utopia ends with the steps of the scaffold, the endless moment of the guillotine.

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. And when Humanity lands there, it...

She was afraid of not being able to pull herself out of the dream world, never waking up, never knowing what really happened, never realizing her goals, her hopes, her dreams.

…I don’t know where a utopia is supposed to be, or where one could be found. I sometimes think that it is the place where fear and doubt end with the realization that around you...

My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.

The fatal error of much science fiction has been to subscribe to an optimism based on the idea that revolution, or a new gimmick, or a bunch of strong men, or an invasion of aliens,...

She said all a body would have to do there [Heaven] was to go around all day long with a harp and sing, forever and ever.

There is no way I can avoid thinking about the kind of world I belong to. The abuse of utopias disfigures everything.

A philosophy untouched by the shadows on the wall can only yield a sterile utopia.

The worst kind of victim was the kind that was aware of nothing.

But the question is, historically, part of the group that you’re a part of – whether it’s racial, gender, religious, whatever – how has your group fared historically? The groups that you’re a part of?...

A fictional Dystopia is better than a fake Utopia.

Rakyat yang nasionalis hendaknya belajar menghemat energi. Pemimpin dan pemerintahan yang nasionalis hendaknya memikirkan cara-cara penghematan, bukan mengeksploitas sisa sumber daya alam yang kita miliki. Kembangkan sistem transportasi massal yang memadai, sehingga jumlah kendaraan di...

Gee, I’d like to go visit Fred, but I can’t because there isn’t a flat thing outside for me to drive on, and I don’t know how to build it and the other 300 million...

I could try composing wonderful musical works, or day-long entertainment epics, but what would that do? Give people pleasure? My wiping this table gives me pleasure. And people come to a clean table, which gives...

The great hatred of capitalism in the hearts of the oppressed, ancient and modern, I think, stems not merely from the ensuing vast inequality in wealth, and the often unfair and arbitrary nature of who...

I’m just an apprentice, stuck between these borrowed first and last breaths that I was given, drinking water of life, and chasing the fire of knowledge, and waiting to mingle with my eternal and faithful...

We can only know what we can truly imagine. Finally what we see comes from ourselves.

What fueled this hatred? Society.

Personally I know only one person who wrote about utopia. Afterwards he was executed. I suppose it’s not my genre.

…I take as a point of departure the possibility and desirability of a fundamentally different form of society–call it communism, if you will–in which men and women, freed from the pressures of scarcity and from...