Top 84 Dystopian Quotes & Sayings

Its a heartening fact about the human race that utopian fiction precedes dystopian fiction in the evolution of literature.

I'm not a 'dystopian, futuristic master': I'm a schnook walking the street. It's an insane reality we're living in, and I'm just trying to translate it for myself.

As a reader, I've always been interested in dystopian novels like 'Nineteen Eighty-four'.

I've always been interested in those Orwellian dystopian novels, like 'Fahrenheit 451,' 'Brave New World,' and obviously Orwell's '1984.'

I majored in English in college, so I read the classic dystopian novels like '1984' and 'Brave New World.'

What tends to happen when people talk about Chinese sci-fi in the West is that there's a lot of projection. We prefer to think of China as a dystopian world that is challenging American hegemony, so we would like to think that Chinese sci-fi is all either militaristic or dystopian. But that's just not the reality of it.

I have very vivid dreams and nightmares, and my biggest fear is of some kind of dystopian future where we're advanced in every way except in our humanity.

People in the know say 'The Giver' was the first young adult dystopian novel.

I've always read broadly: literary fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, chick lit, historical, dystopian, nonfiction, memoir. I've even read Westerns. I prefer female protagonists.

Parents are already telling their kids about falling in love online - there's nothing "frightening" or "dystopian" about this. So, the critique doesn't work, because we already consider our dystopic state of affairs normal.

The way superheroes dominate the fictional landscape now, along with dystopian futures and zombies. Yeah, definitely - I think these stories function as a kind of mythology for us.

People in the know say The Giver was the first young adult dystopian novel.

The kind of dystopian books that I've always loved the most are the ones where you find yourself in a world that's less scorched-earth and instead a world that has just been made different.

Unless technology itself is drastically repressed, the idea of the dystopian monoculture like Orwell's 1984 gets harder to believe. But the danger of a solipsistic society will grow, of a disconnected society of mirror-watchers and navel-gazers.

Most dystopian, classic and contemporary, paints a future world that puts a twist on present society - a future world that could plausibly happen.

Live every day as if you've come back in time from a dystopian future to try and prevent everything from breaking.

Dystopian novels help people process their fears about what the future might look like; further, they usually show that there is always hope, even in the bleakest future.

What's fun about a dystopian novel is that we can enjoy and be entertained. But that world is only slightly different, right? It's familiar enough to be recognizable, and skewed enough to give us pause.

Our social fabric is sundered. GoFundMe and the other crowdfunding sites that have proliferated since 2010 are an example of what has sprung up in its place, what I have called America's dystopian social net. That is, we now require private solutions to what are public problems.

Would we be so enamored with dystopian fiction if we lived in a culture where violent death was a major concern? It wouldn't be escapism.

Within the realm of fiction, it is always tempting to set one's stories in a dystopian future, where all our misgivings about state power can be shown in full force.

I think sci-fi films have become rather bleak, and understandably so - I think we've made some big mistakes globally with how we're developing, and we deal with that guilt by creating these very dystopian futures in films.

I think of dystopian as 'Mad Max,' as 'Book of Eli,' as the world is ending.

Kids' literature now is dystopian, you know.

I'm a huge fan of dystopian films. I collect them in my brain.

I suspect the popularity of young adults and dystopian novels has something to do with a desire for allegory and old-fashioned morality tales. In fact, you might find your religious framework here in dystopian, post-apocalyptic fiction. Here, and in videogames, you find strict codes of authority, the "rules of the game," the life-or-death quest and struggle that people crave.

I look around, and 50 percent of the big-budget entertainment you are seeing these days is dystopian. This is the era of 'Hunger Games' and blasted landscapes and 'The Walking Dead.'

Some of my favourite shows are 'Black Mirror,' a dystopian thriller show called '3%,' 'Ozark,' 'Tyrant,' etc.

I never, as a reader, have been particularly interested in dystopian literature or science fiction or, in fact, fantasy.

My greatest fear about a world in which racial reassignment surgery becomes common is that it then becomes an expression of all kinds of class privilege. You have a truly dystopian society divided between the people who can afford to be racially altered and perfected and the ones who can't.

I think the power of image is in mystery - I endlessly create mysteries, by way of this dystopian message, to initiate intrigue.

There's been so much hunger for dystopian in the YA world, I really wasn't sure how Shadow and Bone' would be received.

I don't buy into the dystopian scenarios of self-aware robots enslaving mankind, but you don't have to be a sci-fi conspiracy theorist to acknowledge that plenty of good, well-paying jobs are being taken over by machines.

Every new generation of SF writers remakes cyberpunk - a genre often laced with dystopian subtexts - in its own image.

I'm not really interested in the exploding car or endless sort of dystopian fantasies and superheroes. None of that... that doesn't interest me very much.

Airports! The neon floodlit, recycled air filled, melodramatic hell of them. The purposeful mass migration of anxiety-ridden humans as they frantically navigate through beeping buggies and mechanised walkways to make it to their gate in time is the stuff of dystopian nightmares.

It's a heartening fact about the human race that utopian fiction precedes dystopian fiction in the evolution of literature.

When I first read Margaret Atwood's novel 'The Handmaid's Tale,' it was Saudi Arabia as I knew it that came to mind, not a dystopian future United States as in the new television adaptation.

If you're an activist trying to do something important, I salute you. Most of us just give ourselves ethical brownie points for watching Channel 2 instead of Channel 3, like characters in a broad dystopian satire.

'Blade Runner' was one of several dystopian science-fiction films to tank in the early and middle '80s. 'Tron,' 'The Dark Crystal,' 'The Keep,' 'Labyrinth': none found a large audience.

The copyright industry has managed to kill civil liberties for their own children, ushering in a dystopian surveillance machine, merely to avoid taking responsibility for their own business failures. I lack words to quantify my contempt for these utter parasites.

All the definitions people want to put on you in terms of what kind of writer you are come with hidden meanings. If you're writing science fiction, you're writing rocket ships. If you write dystopian fiction, it's inequity where The Man must be fought.

Much like dystopian and post-apocalyptic books are a way to explore the worst-case scenarios lurking around the corner, fantasy can serve as a wonderful tool for showing kids that they have an inherent power in them to create change, both in themselves and in their community.

Dystopian, by definition, promises a darker story.

'Dystopian,' by definition, promises a darker story.

I think dystopian futures are also a reflection of current fears.

Writers of feminist dystopian fiction are alert to the realities that grind down women's lives, that make the unthinkable suddenly thinkable.

I think that a lot of dystopian literature tends to be really moralizing and just doesn't tend to give credence to the importance of the sentimental. Maybe it says, "We need love in this world," but it's always this tough, strong statement.

At the core of 'Star Trek' is Gene Roddenberry's vision of the future. So much of science-fiction is about a dystopian society with human civilization having crumbled. He had an affirmative, shining, positive view of the future.

It's a dystopian world where things aren't connected. But life feels light when we can communicate, joke or laugh on ourselves.

Shelley Jackson's 'Half Life' is the textual equivalent of an installation, a multivocal, polymorphous, dialogic, dystopian satire wrapped around a murder mystery wrapped around a bildungsroman.

For its speculations to be taken seriously, dystopian fiction must be part of a discussion of contemporary society, a projection of ongoing political failures perhaps, or the wringing of present jeopardy for future disaster.

We are all living in a techno-dystopian fantasy, the Internet-connected portals we rely on rendering the world in all its granular detail and absurdity like Borges's 'Aleph.'

Dystopian novels, such as Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four,' often tend to site their despotised or deformed civilisations in urban environments.

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.

Although I write dystopian fiction, I don't believe in dystopian fantasies.

YouTube is the place where people go to consume advertisements willingly. It's some capitalist dystopian nightmare.

I think people respond to dystopian stories because they're ways of acting out anxieties that we have and fears that we have about the future. So much media's coming at you over the Internet, your brain gets overloaded. You don't know what to do with it. And one thing you can do with it is read a story.

Orwell had a very accurate foresight of today's dystopian world we live in. If only he was around to see it.

I feel as if dystopian and utopian representations are historically the most effective way of criticizing modern society. You know, because you don't have to be factually accurate. You can kind of construct some awesome strawman arguments in your fictional world.