A Quote by Marguerite Young

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

Quote Topics

Believe Desire Human I Believe Lost Obsession Search Structure Work Works

Quote Author

Marguerite Young
American - Novelist
August 28, 1908 - November 17, 1995

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

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

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

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

Utopias are presented for our inspection as a critique of the human state.

William Golding

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

Lewis Mumford

The most common characteristic of women's history is to be lost and discovered, lost again and rediscovered, lost once more and re-rediscovered - a process of tragic waste and terrible silences that will continue until women's stories are a full and equal part of the human story.

Gloria Steinem

If you ask me what I believe in today, I believe in feminism. I believe that all human beings are equal. I believe that no one has the right to authority over anyone else. Feminism has to do with everything in the world, a vision of how the world can be. I have great doubts about Utopias, but I just keep on thinking there is a better way to live than the way we live now.

Marilyn French

Why have we had to invent Eden, to live submerged in the nostalgia of a lost paradise, to make up utopias, propose a future for ourselves?

Julio Cortazar

Utopias have their value -- nothing so wonderfully expands the imaginative horizons of human potentialities -- but as guides to conduct they can prove literally fatal.

Isaiah Berlin

The Fundamental Principle that governs - or ought to govern -human affairs if we wish to avoid misunderstandings, conflicts, or pointless utopias, is negotiation.