A Quote by Lewis Mumford

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

Lewis Mumford

Quote Topics

Existence Fallacy Goal Human Human Existence Legitimate Perfection Rest

Quote Author

Lewis Mumford
American - Sociologist
October 19, 1895 - January 26, 1990

It is true that I am not one of those who laugh at utopias. The utopia of today can become the reality of tomorrow. Utopias are conceived by optimistic logic which regards constant social and political progress as the ultimate goal of human endeavor; pessimism would plunge a hopeless mankind into a fresh cataclysm.

Charles Albert Gobat

I believe that all my work explores the human desire or obsession for utopias, and the structure of all my works is the search for utopias lost and rediscovered.

Marguerite Young

Technical Utopias-flying, for example-have been achieved by the new science of nature.The human utopia...a united new humankind living in solidarity and peace, free from economic determination and from war and class struggle-can be achieved, provided we spend the same energy, intelligence, and enthusiasm on the realization of the human Utopia as we have spent on the realization of our technical Utopias.

Erich Fromm

There are two generic and invariable features that characterize utopias. One is the content: the authors of utopias paint what they consider to be ideal societies; translating this into the language of mathematics, we might say that utopias bear a + sign. The other feature, organically growing out of the content, is to be found in the form: a utopia is always static; it is always descriptive and has no, of almost no, plot dynamics.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

The goal of the human soul is conquest, perfection, security, superiority.

Alfred Adler

There is no permanent place in this universe for evil... Evil may hide behind this fallacy and that, but it will be hunted from fallacy to fallacy until there is no more fallacy for it to hide behind.

Thomas Carlyle

The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.

Masanobu Fukuoka

Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, although human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.

Richard Dawkins

I'm training all the time. My goal is perfection. But I will never reach perfection.

Georges St-Pierre

To be known by God is the highest goal of human existence.

R. C. Sproul

Love appears and says: "You think you're heading towards a specific point, but the whole justification for the goal's existence lies in your love for it. Rest a little,but as soon as you can, get up and carry on. Because ever since your goal found out that you were traveling toward it, it has been running to meet you.

Paulo Coelho

Paganism is that view of life which finds the highest goal of human existence in the healthy and harmonious and joyous development of existing human faculties. Very different is the Christian ideal. Paganism is optimistic with regard to unaided human nature, whereas Christianity is the religion of the broken heart.

John Gresham Machen

The most influential utopian idea of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was socialism, which has failed everywhere. Under the banner of socialism, Stalin's U.S.S.R. and Mao's China gave us not utopias but ghastly anti-utopias.

Steven Weinberg

Complete and total perfection will come about only when we feel that our perfection is no perfections as long as the rest of humanity remains imperfect.