"Utopian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the new age was, therefore, one of reform, not of revolution. It called for no evolutionary or utopian experiments, but for the steady and progressive enactment of measures aimed at admitted abuses and designed to accomplish tangible results in ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... from the conviction of his sound heart and his manly nature. Wrestling at one time with bitter poverty, at one with unhappy passion—lonely in his habits, prematurely broken in his health, his later wisdom dispelling his early dreams of Utopian liberty—still, throughout all, his bravery never fails him, his gentleness is never soured; his philanthropy changes its form, but it is never chilled. Even when he wanders into error, it is from his search for truth. That humanity which the French writers of the last century sought to preach, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... sold into service to work out their sentences. Thus did the practical settlers attempt to carry out one of Sir Thomas More's Utopian notions. Upon the whole, I think I should rather have a Nipmuck squaw cooking in my kitchen, or a Pequot warrior digging in my garden, than to have a white burglar or ruffian in ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... "Utopian but very short-sighted," Nigel commented. "If my uncle had lived to finish decoding the report upon which he was engaged, I could have offered you proof not only of the existence of the spirit I speak of, but of certain practical schemes inimical ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... that even an equilibrium between sexuality and love cannot always be established, while a genuine and complete unification is very unusual and may, perhaps, be called utopian. In the previous chapters I have dealt with the blending of both elements in the highest form of eroticism; in the following I will attempt to throw light on some of the principal phenomena resulting from a defective union of sexuality ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... cults. In the parlor of her home she had listened to frank, fantastic discussions; to lawless theories. These discussions, beginning anywhere, ended always with the reform of the marriage relation. Anarchist, socialist, nihilist, atheist, Utopian, altruist—all tinkered with the family group, as if they recognized that the civilization they were at war with rested upon this and no ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... knowledge, introduction of improvements, and all the benefits and blessings that among Freemen are diffused, where authority like the parental, from a sense of community of interest and the natural goodness of mankind, is softened into brotherly concern. This is no Utopian picture of the characteristics of elevated rank, wealth, competence, and learned and liberal education in England; for, with the liberty of speech and writing that prevails amongst us, if such rays of light and love did not generally emanate from superiority of station, possessions, and accomplishment, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... to mention among other things in this play, that Shakespeare has anticipated nearly all the arguments on the Utopian schemes of modern philosophy: ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... socially practised, that Mrs Lammle looked at her young friend in some astonishment. Her young friend sat nervously twiddling her fingers in a pinioned attitude, as if she were trying to hide her elbows. But this latter Utopian object (in short sleeves) always appeared to be the great ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... vehemently opposed Madison's proposition for a more general convention, with more general powers. They wished things to get more and more into confusion, to justify the violent measure they proposed. The idea of establishing a government by reasoning and agreement, they publicly ridiculed as an Utopian project, visionary and unexampled. ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... Utopian parity is a kind of government, to be wished for, [623]rather than effected, Respub. Christianopolitana, Campanella's city of the Sun, and that new Atlantis, witty fictions, but mere chimeras; and Plato's community ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... the day as men who have lived in hot climates are accustomed to do. They used to come in together in very pleasant moods to breakfast; but with the post-bag Lorraine's uncle was sure to be moved to voluble indignation, or pity, or to Utopian plans to which my father listened with puzzled impatience. He did not understand the Colonel, which was perhaps ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... to liberty, that spirit of moderation and forbearance for which our countrymen were once distinguished, continue to be cherished. If this continues to be the ruling passion of our souls, the weaker feeling of the mistaken enthusiast will be corrected, the Utopian dreams of the scheming politician dissipated, and the complicated intrigues of the demagogue rendered harmless. The spirit of liberty is the sovereign balm for every injury which our institutions may receive. On the contrary, no care that can be used ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... they soar over the blooming heather and the "bright consummate flowers." And these human bees had their passions, too! their massacres; their tragedies; their "Rival Queens"; their combats; their sentinels; their dreams of that Utopian form of government realized in the communistic society ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... of a child's conceptions. Coleridge at sixteen was already a poet, his ear attuned to the subtlest melody of verse, and his hand rivalling, in preluding fragments, the efforts of his maturer years; he was already a philosopher, rapt in Utopian, schemes and mantling hopes as enchanting—and as chimerical—as the pleasure-domes and caves of ice decreed by Kubla Khan; and the younger lad became ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... to a certain point: he had a good knowledge of many things, science, sociology, and his various trades: he had a very poor knowledge of many others: and he was just as cocksure with both: he had Utopian notions, just ideas, ignorance in many directions, a practical mind, many prejudices, experience, and suspicion and hatred of burgess society. That did not prevent his welcoming Christophe. His pride was tickled by being sought out ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... has given an adjective to our language—we call an impracticable scheme Utopian. Yet, under the veil of a playful fiction, the talk is intensely earnest, and abounds in practical suggestion. It is the work of a scholarly and witty Englishman, who attacks in his own way the chief political and social evils of ...
— Utopia • Thomas More
... Bob, thus forming his Utopian plans, forgot the tedium of the trail. No person is so happy as when doing something to make some other person happy. And Bob was happy because he believed he was to be the means of bringing happiness to many. Making a comfortable living himself, he would make ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace
... distribution of artistic activity should seem, to my contemporaries, Utopian, I would point out that it has existed throughout the past, and in states of society infinitely worse than are ever likely to recur. For even slaves and serfs could make unto themselves some kind of art befitting their conditions; and even the most despotic aristocracies ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... the polemical value of such a theory in political controversy. Tacitus, a splenetic Roman aristocrat, had satirized the degeneracy of the empire under the guise of a description of the primitive virtues of a Utopian Germany; and modern theorists have found in his Germania an armoury of democratic weapons against aristocracy and despotism. From this golden age the Angles and Saxons are supposed to have derived a political system in which most men were free and equal, owning their land ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... bewildered at all that had passed, flattered, almost intoxicated with the attention of various kinds paid her by every one, at High Down, and when her wonted dread of Marian's disapproving eye would return, hardening herself against it with the thought that Marian could not make every one as Utopian as her own Edmund and Fern Torr, that she was proud and determined in prejudice, and after all what right had she to interfere? Of Walter, Caroline did ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... savages lay in wait, athirst for blood. We hear without surprise that wise and prudent men looked upon the early attempts to take possession of America as not less wild and visionary than the legendary exploits of Amadis de Gaul; but what Utopian dreamer, what poet soaring in the high regions of his fancy, could have imagined two centuries and a half ago the beauty, the power, the free and majestic sweep of the stream of human life which has poured across this continent? Who could have dared to hope that the religious exiles who sought ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... aphorism is not the only one to which the political architect should give heed. An equality of conditions, of political powers and privileges, which has no solid basis in an equality of capacity or fitness, is one of the wildest and most impracticable of all Utopian dreams. If in the divine government such an equality should prevail, it is evident that all order would be overthrown, all justice extinguished, and utter confusion would reign. In like manner, if in human government such equality should exist, it would be only for a moment ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... at first deemed Utopian, was opposed by many well meaning men who feared that its effect would be to give a shock to the trade and domestic industry of the province; and who thought that, as the depreciation had been gradual, justice required that the appreciation should ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 1 (of 5) • John Marshall
... chapel who can do that would do it, and keep on doing it, who can tell what an influence would come from some hundreds of new workers for Christ? And why should the existence of a church in which the workers are as numerous as the Christians be an Utopian dream? It is simply the dream that perhaps a church might be conceived to exist, all the members of which had found out their plainest, most imperative duty, and were really ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... shame that the change should be forced prematurely by the efforts of this man Symes. Really I feel a distinct sense of personal injury at his innovations." Van Lennop laughed slightly. "The old way was the best way for a long time to come, it seems to me. That was real democracy—a Utopian condition that had of necessity to go with the town's growth, but certainly not at this stage. In larger communities it is natural enough that those of similar tastes should seek each other, but, in a place like Crowheart where the interests and the mental calibre of its ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... Snelling, and a brass band was playing national airs on a staging erected on the green in front of the post-office. Nightly meetings took place at Grimsey's Hall, and the audiences were good-humored and orderly. Torrini advanced some Utopian theories touching a universal distribution of wealth, which were listened to attentively, but failed to ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... chance glimpses in letters and suchlike documents, were it not that he happened to be the first man of affairs in England to imitate the "Republic" of Plato. By that chance it fell to him to give the world a noun and an adjective of abuse, "Utopian," and to record how under the stimulus of Plato's releasing influence the opening problems of our modern world presented themselves to the English mind of his time. For the most part the problems that ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... to others. Thus his virtue spontaneously opens the springs of wit and humour in him amid the terrors of the storm and shipwreck; and he is merry while others are suffering, and merry even from sympathy with them; and afterwards his thoughtful spirit plays with Utopian fancies; and if "the latter end of his Commonwealth forgets the beginning," it is all the same to him, his purpose being only to beguile the anguish of supposed bereavement. It has been well said that "Gonzalo is so occupied with duty, in which alone he finds ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... state of society Arthur's father had been thrown at the age of twenty-five—a young married parson, full of faith, hope, and love. He had battled with it like a man, and had lots of fine Utopian ideas about the perfectibility of mankind, glorious humanity, and such-like, knocked out of his head, and a real, wholesome Christian love for the poor, struggling, sinning men, of whom he felt himself one, and with and for whom he spent fortune, and strength, ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... and opposed Henry's Church innovations, we are struck with his Utopian claim for great freedom of inquiry on all subjects, even religion; and the bold assertion that no man should be punished for his religion, because "a man cannot make himself believe anything he pleases," as Henry's six bloody articles so fearfully asserted he must. The Utopia ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... but a utopian scheme to dream of bridging such a flood as this,' observed Holt. 'No piers of man's construction could withstand the force that is in motion on the river to-night. I fear the promoters of the Victoria ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... "What forced, overdriven, Utopian stuff! A kingdom always coming, and never come! I hold by what is. This solid, plowable earth will serve my turn. My business is what I ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... been abundant speculations as to the originals of the Pickwickian characters—some Utopian enough, but I do not think that any have been offered in the case of Mr. Pott, the redoubtable editor of the Eatanswill Gazette. I am inclined to believe that the notorious and brilliant Dr. Maginn was intended. He and Pott were both distinguished for their "slogging" ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... untrammeled by outside influence, is considerable, largely a genial satire on critics and philosophers; his stay in the moon is a kind of Utopian fancy. ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... in the mills, and saw how his whole scheme hung together, harmonizing the work and leisure of the operatives, instead of treating them as half machine, half man, and neglecting the man for the machine. Nor was she content with Utopian generalities: she wanted to know the how and why of each case, to hear what conclusions he drew from his results, to ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... Utopian thoughts: I have dallied long enough with life; 'tis time to be in earnest. I have a fond, an aged mother to care for: and some other bosom ties perhaps equally tender. Where the individual only suffers by the ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... country as in France, may be regarded as an offset of the French Revolution. It is true that, in all times, the striking disparity between the conditions of men has given rise to Utopian speculations—to schemes of some new order of society, where the comforts of life should be enjoyed in a more equalized manner than seems possible under the old system of individual efforts and individual rights; and it may be added that, as this disparity of wealth becomes more glaring in proportion ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... be successful have not to be submitted to the same laws of a commercial or industrial combine. Ethnical and moral values do not follow the laws of the mart and the stock exchange. If in our extensive Dominion even a unity of tariff, readily acceptable to the East and to the West, is Utopian, how much more so would be the unity of the school system? Education, to be effective, must take the colour of the environments to meet the needs of the community. The levelling process would be most detrimental, for uniformity in education is ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... him still, there was something beyond his habitual compassionate fervor—something due to the fascination of her womanhood. He was very open to that sort of charm, and mingled it with the consciously Utopian pictures of his own future; yet any one able to trace the folds of his character might have conceived that he would be more likely than many less passionate men to love a woman without telling her of it. Sprinkle food before a delicate-eared bird: there is nothing he would more willingly ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... the Republic an instance of Utopian theorising. It is a criticism of contemporary Greek civilisation, intended to remove the greatest practical difficulty in life. Man has tried all kinds of governments and found none satisfactory. All have proved selfish ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... to Utopian ideas by certain hereditary influences; his grandmother's nervous disorders became in him so much chronic enthusiasm, striving after everything that was grandiose and impossible. His lonely childhood, his imperfect education, had developed his natural tendencies in a singular ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... mountain barrier to man's presumption, scouted at a possible wagon road, not to say railway, across the continent, lamented the unprofitable theft of California, and cursed the Alaska purchase as money worse than thrown away. In view of what has been and is, can anyone call it a Utopian dream to picture the Pacific bordered by an advanced civilization with cities more brilliant than any of the ancient East, more opulent than ...
— Some Cities and San Francisco and Resurgam • Hubert Howe Bancroft
... only going to ask you to read a little five cent pamphlet, by Gaylord Wilshire, called The Significance of the Trust, and a little book by Frederick Engels, called Socialism, Utopian and Scientific. Later on, when I have had a chance to explain Socialism in a general way, and must then leave you to your own resources, I intend to make for you a list of books, which I hope you will be able ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... not Utopian: but I will tell you what would have seemed, if we had not seen it, Utopian on the side of evil instead of good; that ever men should have come to value their money so much more than their lives, that if you call upon them to become soldiers, and take chance of a bullet through their ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... is certainly making progress, and in the last seasons at Covent Garden it was occasionally employed even before the fashionable subscribers, who may be presumed to have tolerated it, since they did not manifest any disapproval of its use. Since the first edition of this book was published, the Utopian idea, as it then seemed, of a national opera for London has advanced considerably towards realisation, and it is certain that when it is set on foot, the English language ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... say that?" cried the king. "He has the Utopian thought to believe that he can defy my wishes. Tell him he is mistaken; he must submit to me as I had to ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... flattery towards indifferent people? It may be thought, by latitudinarians in politeness, that we are too rigid in expecting this strict adherence to truth from people who live in society; it may be said, that in Practical Education, no such Utopian ideas of perfection should be suggested. If we thought them Utopian, we certainly should not waste our time upon them; but we do not here speak theoretically of what may be done, we speak of what has been done. Without ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... Pandora, the mischief-maker among the Utopian shepherds. In Act v. she receives her commission to conform the moon to her ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... but mark you, this does not commit me to compliance with all your Utopian schemes. If you were raving mad, I should sympathize, but nevertheless I should see that the strait-jacket was brought into requisition. When your generosity train dashes recklessly beyond regulation schedules ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... members were University professors, lawyers, newspaper men, and a few business men. "But," says one of them, "in spirit they were poets, philosophers and prophets. They were aware that their solutions of problems vexing to the brains of other men, would be Utopian, but as they were not willing to be classed with ordinary Utopians they named their club Amaurot, after the capital of Utopia, thus signifying that while they dwelt in Utopia, they were not subject to it but were ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... good, and to treat any reference to the moral and political principles which condemned the imperial system, and all systems like it, beyond hope or appeal, as simply the pretext of a mutinous or Utopian impatience. ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... handsome youth of eighteen came to the throne, the hopes of England ran high. His intelligence, his frank, genial manners, his sympathy with the "new learning," won all classes. Erasmus in his hopes of purifying the Church, and Sir Thomas More in his "Utopian" dreams for politics and society, felt that a friend had come to the throne in the young ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... so very much, really," he smiled. "I had to learn a little, if I wanted to work the land, so I borrowed an elementary text from Cutler." Had he been a trifle idealistic in quitting his snug, if uninspiring, job on the faculty to join in this Utopian venture? So many of the other men at the university had enrolled, it had seemed a splendid ...
— The Venus Trap • Evelyn E. Smith
... that she was bored and weary while doing the honors of her own salon with an absent mind. He even found the political opinions of his friend echoed by his wife, who laughed at him for what she called his Utopian liberalism. Her mockery had no malice in it; but still it was mockery, and behind it was Termonde, always Termonde. Nevertheless, he said nothing, and the shyness, which he had always felt in my mother's presence ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... was amazing, the desolation was complete. As to our visionary sceptics and Utopian philosophers, they stood no chance with our lecturer—he did not "carve them as a dish fit for the Gods, but hewed them as a carcase fit for hounds." Poor Godwin, who had come, in the bonhommie and candour of his nature, to ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... subjects, with the uniformity and decision of the Evangelical system,—his dark notions in relation to God (candidly confessed) with the glorious recognition of Him in the Gospel as 'our Father,'—his utterly absurd application of his general principles of morals, in his most Utopian of all Republics, with the broad, plain social ethics of Christianity,—the tone of mournful familiarity (whatever his personal immunity) in which he too often speaks of the saddest pollutions that ever degraded humanity, with the spotless purity ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... foundation of a great ideal Latin union. Wonderful is his optimism. Some of the Felibres about him are somewhat discouraged, many of them have never set their aspirations as high as he has done, and some look upon his dreams as Utopian. Whatever be the future of the movement he has founded, Mistral's life in its simple oneness, and in its astonishing success, is indeed most remarkable. Provence, the land that first gave the world a literature after the decay of the classic tongues, has awakened again under his ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... artist and philosopher best secured under a government that is stable and lasting; better still under a government that confines itself rigidly to its own sphere and leaves manners and morals to the taste of the individual; best of all under that Utopian absence of any government, whether of the many or of the few, whereof all ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... was looked upon as foolish and Utopian. Good men regarded it as utterly impracticable, and bad men condemned and denounced it as selfish and mercenary. The Christian church had not listened to the wail of a dying world as it echoed over land and ocean and sounded along our shores; she had not realized the great ...
— Daughters of the Cross: or Woman's Mission • Daniel C. Eddy
... not new. It is not a Utopian and visionary theory, unsupported by experience. It has been successfully tried in the Island of Barbadoes, by the late Joshua Steele; and the result exceeded his most sanguine expectations. "The first principles, of his plan," says Mr. Dickson, "are the plain ones, of treating the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... felony. It loves to protect and not to oppress those who are weaker than itself. It has at heart the work of propagating throughout the world certain principles of social life which certainly are utopian, but are yet beautiful to have before the eyes and in the heart, in order to live not only for the present, ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... interested in politics. Revolution was in the air, and Wagner had to have his say on that as on every other topic. He made speeches and published pamphlets; and just as his musical schemes seemed wild to such contemporaries as the late Charles Halle, so his ideas of social regeneration must have seemed Utopian to the point of sheer lunacy to the very comrades with whom he was acting. The explosion came; barricades were thrown up in the Dresden streets, and Wagner sought to bring about a quiet ending to the crisis by appealing ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... pedantic education of the monasteries, and asserts the highest ideals of science and humanity. With an equal loathing of asceticism, he satirizes the monks themselves, and sketches out, in his description of the Abbey of Theleme, a glowing vision of the Utopian convent. His thought was bold; but he lived in a time when the mildest speculation was fraught with danger; and he says what he has to say in the shifting and ambiguous forms of jest and allegory. Yet it was by no means simply for the sake of concealment that he made his work into the singular ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... municipal forest is not a Utopian dream, but a practical thing well within the reach of almost any city. The law passed by the last legislature makes it possible for a city to purchase land for such a purpose either within or without the city limits. The activities of the present park boards show ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... Trirodov—quietly. Then, turning to the older people: "Boys of his age love fantastic tales. Even we love Utopia and read Wells. The very life which we are now creating is a joining, as it were, of real existence with fantastic and Utopian elements. Take, for example, this ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... impassioned speech, in which he declared that he wished he had died two months before when democracy seemed such a promising dream. He then appealed to his associates in the council, of which he was a vice president, to set aside their Utopian fantasies for the time being and consider the needs of the present. His oratory carried the day. The council agreed to a coalition cabinet which should have full control ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... service of the Czar feels no scruples, nor laments his conduct. He kills coldly, with the minuteness and exactitude with which he does everything. The Russian is a barbarian who strikes and regrets; German civilization shoots without hesitation. Our Slav Czar, in a humanitarian dream, favored the Utopian idea of universal peace, organizing the Conference of The Hague. The Kaiser of culture, meanwhile, has been working years and years in the erection and establishment of a destructive organ of an immensity heretofore ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... by the President." The clause got through the Senate by the casting vote of the Vice-President, and a similar provision was inserted, without further contest, in all the acts creating the executive departments. It is rather striking evidence of the Utopian expectations which could then be indulged that Daniel Carroll of Maryland was persistent in urging that the existence of the office should be limited to a few years, "under a hope that a time would come when the United States would be disengaged ...
— Washington and His Colleagues • Henry Jones Ford
... Lincoln. These were as good men, as disinterested and unselfish men, as ever served a State; and they were also as strong men as ever founded or saved a State. Surely such examples prove that there is nothing Utopian in our effort to combine justice and strength in the same nation. The really high civilizations must themselves supply the antidote to the self-indulgence and love of ease ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... ago, when the Friends of Peace, those generous Utopian dreamers, came to London, they were received at the station by the most celebrated English economists, carried in triumph to the residences prepared for them, taken to visit all that is curious in ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... ben trovato[It]; air drawn, airbuilt[obs3]. imagining &cv. v, imaginative; original, inventive, creative, fertile. romantic, high flown, flighty, extravagant, fanatic, enthusiastic, unrealistic, Utopian, Quixotic. ideal, unreal; in the clouds, in nubibus[Lat]; unsubsantial[obs3] &c. 4; illusory &c. (fallacious) 495. fabulous, legendary; mythical, mythic, mythological; chimerical; imaginary, visionary; notional; fancy, fanciful, fantastic, fantastical[obs3]; whimsical; fairy, fairy-like; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... with a half-didactic purpose, to contrast the peasant's honest rudeness and straightforwardness with the refined sophistication and hypocrisy of the higher classes. George Sand, with her beautiful Utopian genius, poured forth a torrent of rural narrative of a crystalline limpidity ("Mouny Robin," "La Mare au Diable," "La Petite Fadette," etc., 1841-1849), which is as far removed from the turbid stream of Balzac ("Les Paysans") and Zola ("La Terre"), as Paradise is from ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... he is a part. The emphasis is laid upon the solidarity of mankind, and man is explained by such social facts as heredity and environment. Marx and Engels, the pioneers of the socialistic movement, accepted in the fullest sense the scientific doctrine of evolution. So far from being a mere Utopian dream, Marx contends that Socialism is the inevitable outcome of the movement of modern society. The aim of the agitation is to bring men to a clear consciousness of a process which is going forward in all countries where the modern industrial methods prevail. Democracy must ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... uniform?" He nodded. "With a number on it perhaps—a number on a large disk of metal strapped round the left arm? D. K. F. 78,910—that sort of thing?" It was even so. "And all of them, men and women alike, looking very well cared for? Very Utopian, and smelling rather strongly of carbolic, and all of them quite hairless?" I was right every time. Soames was only not sure whether the men and women were hairless or shorn. "I hadn't time to look at them very closely," ...
— Enoch Soames - A Memory of the Eighteen-nineties • Max Beerbohm
... make it are ignorant and lawless. So the constitution which Savonarola gave was neither aristocratic nor democratic. It resembled that of Venice more than that of Athens, that of England more than that of the United States. Strictly universal suffrage is a Utopian dream wherever a majority of the people are wicked and degraded. Sooner or later it threatens to plunge any nation, as nations now are, into a whirlpool of dangers, even if Divine Providence may not permit a nation to be stranded and wrecked ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... forward by the present writer twenty years ago in a little book on The Nationalisation of Health, which, though it met with wide approval, was probably regarded by most people as Utopian. Since then the times have moved, a new generation has sprung up, and ideas which, twenty years ago, were brooded over by isolated thinkers are now seen to be in the direct line of progress; they have become the property ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... house at Concord, owned by the descendants of Reverend Dr. Ripley. It will be remembered that Hawthorne had invested his only thousand dollars in the West Roxbury Utopia, whence it was no longer possible to recover it. He had, however, an unsubstantial Utopian sort of claim for it, against the Association, which he placed in the hands of George S. Hillard, and subsequent negotiation would seem to have resulted in giving Hawthorne a lease of the Ripley house, or "Old Manse," in return for it. It was ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... illustration," replied Father Waite, "of the mighty fact that there is nothing so practical as real Christianity. I want you to tell Professor Cane that. He calls her 'the girl with the Utopian views,' because of her ingenuous replies in his sociological class. But I want you to show him that she is ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... it may be said this is an utopian idea, which, in the present state of religious feelings and ecclesiastical differences, never can be realised. It were a sufficient answer to the charge of utopianism brought against such a proposal, to plead that it was no more than what ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... I do not doubt that Caesar was killed from a true desire to restore the Roman Republic. They desired to restore a thing that was in itself evil—the evils of which had induced Caesar to see that he might make himself its master. But Cicero had conceived a Republic in his own mind—not Utopian, altogether human and rational—a Republic which he believed to have been that of Scipio, of Marcellus, and Laelius: a Republic which should do nothing for him but require his assistance, in which the people should vote, and the oligarchs rule in accordance with ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... written, we could not have called it a Socialist Manifesto. By Socialists, in 1847, were understood, on the one hand, the adherents of the various Utopian systems: Owenites in England, Fourierists in France, both of them already reduced to the position of mere sects, and gradually dying out; on the other hand, the most multifarious social quacks, who, by all manners of tinkering, professed to redress, without any ...
— Manifesto of the Communist Party • Karl Marx
... follow the advice given in this book, and you will awake to the fact that Nietsche's words were not "Utopian" when he commanded us to "reproduce something ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... understanding, but by other methods, and consequently all degrees of understanding often meet in the same class, and must ex necessitate frequently converse together, the impossibility of accomplishing any such Utopian scheme very plainly appears. Here therefore is a visible but unavoidable imperfection in ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... only many aspirations of our modern radicals were already realized in the middle ages, but much of what is described now as Utopian was accepted then as a matter of fact. We are laughed at when we say that work must be pleasant, but—"every one must be pleased with his work," a medieval Kuttenberg ordinance says, "and no one shall, while doing nothing (mit nichts thun), appropriate for himself what others have produced by ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... "The Utopian," because I thought some of the little essays would fall in with all that filled your mind, and perhaps help you to a spirit of hopefulness and confidence which will come to you and abide with you, I am sure. You will soon receive another book written ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... not owe their position to their qualifications at all. As to the rest, the realism which seems their essential qualification often consists not only in a lack of romantic imagination, which lack is a merit, but of the realistic, constructive, Utopian imagination, which lack is a ghastly defect. Freedom from imaginative illusion is therefore no guarantee whatever of nobility of character: that is why inculcated submissiveness makes us slaves to people much worse than ourselves, and why it is so important that ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... dangerous. People think that dreamers do no harm. They are mistaken: dreamers do a great heal of harm. Even apparently inoffensive utopian ideas really exercise a noxious influence. They tend to inspire disgust ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... most celebrated—justly celebrated—of Rabelais's imaginations is that of the Abbey of Theleme [Thelema]. This constitutes a kind of Rabelaisian Utopia. It was proper of the released monk to give his Utopian dream the form of an abbey, but an abbey in which the opposite should obtain of all that he had so heartily hated in his own monastic experience. A humorously impossible place and state was the Abbey of Theleme,—a kind of sportive Brook Farm ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... field—in commerce, in the government diplomatic service, in the professions of law and medicine, in the ranks of pure science. We are bordering on the fantastical, are we not? Dreaming, you will probably say, of the Utopian in crime organisation. Quite so, Mr. Dale. I only ask you to consider the POSSIBILITIES if what I say is true. Now let us proceed. I am going to take you into three rooms—the three whose doors you see ahead ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... feature of the school will arrest his attention is almost certain. Utopia belongs to a county which is proverbial for the dullness of its rustics, but there is no sign of dullness on the face of any Utopian child. On the contrary, so radiantly bright are the faces of the children that something akin to sunshine seems always to fill the school. When he gets to know the school, the visitor will realise that the brightness ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... the ideal upheld by Socialism, the ideal of the Co-operative Commonwealth in which the economic conditions will give birth to the highest, purest, most altruistic ethics the world has yet seen. It is true the co-operative commonwealth is far more than a Utopian ideal, it is a scientific prediction, but at this point I wish to emphasize its function ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... it difficult to carry out the scheme described in the last chapter. They indeed who know anything of such matters will be inclined to call it Utopian, and to say that one so wise in worldly matters as our schoolmaster should not have attempted to combine so many things. He wanted a gentleman, a schoolmaster, a curate, a matron, and a lady,—we may say all ...
— Dr. Wortle's School • Anthony Trollope
... This was no Utopian dream transiently indulged, amid the charms of novelty. It was a deliberate purpose with him, the result of innate and enduring inclinations. Throughout the whole course of his career, agricultural life appears ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... all. In June, 1794, he made a visit to an old schoolfellow at Oxford. Here he met Robert Southey of Balliol College. A friendship sprang up between them out of which, before the end of the summer, grew the Utopian scheme of Pantisocracy. A company of gentlemen and ladies were to emigrate to America, take up lands in the Susquehanna valley, and there establish an ideal community in which all should bear rule equally and find happiness in a life of justice, labor, ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... for study, and suddenly the bottom of my perfidious purse dropped out. Bitter was my disappointment. But in another year I began a new career which brought me happiness, new opportunities, new friends and dividends from Utopian investments. Health and hope, my natural inheritance, returned. Boyhood was gone, but ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... direction of international copyright. It was to be a petition signed by the leading American authors, asking the United States to declare itself to be the first to stand for right and justice by enacting laws against the piracy of foreign books. It was a rather utopian scheme, as most schemes for moral progress are, in their beginning. It would not be likely ever to reach Congress, but it would appeal to Howells and his Cambridge friends. Clemens wrote, outlining his plan ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... certain curious theories which have been put forth to account for the origin of Masonry in general, and of the organization of the Grand Lodge in particular. They are as follows: First, that it was all due to an imaginary Temple of Solomon described by Lord Bacon in a Utopian romance called the New Atlantis; and this despite the fact that the temple in the Bacon story was not a house at all, but the name of an ideal state. Second, that the object of Freemasonry and the origin of the Third Degree was the restoration of Charles II to the throne ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... a beginning by men whose names are familiar to the Canadians. These were some of the pioneers of improvement, and some of them yet living have to combat the vulgar or interested reproach of being possessed with ideas of utopian schemes. But it is time to turn again to the baser things of Lower Canada. Lord Dalhousie, who had paid a visit to Nova Scotia, immediately after the prorogation of the parliament of Lower Canada, returned to Quebec in August. ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... is proposed for adoption must be neither Utopian nor extravagant, but accordant throughout with British ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... many, political and social, were propounded in these eighteen years of compromise. Legitimists, Bonapartists, and Republicans were all three in opposition to the Government, each with a programme to tempt the petty burgess. Saint-Simonism too was abroad with its utopian ideals, attracting some of the loftier minds, but less appreciated by the masses than the teachings of other semi-secret societies having aims ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... will dismiss the suggestion as Utopian. 'Nationality', they will say, 'revealed itself first as a constructive force, and Europe staked its future upon it; but now that we are committed to it, it has developed a sinister destructiveness which we cannot remedy. Nationality brought the ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... instruction in every department of science, from mathematics to sociology, as can possibly be made general: and his ideas of what is possible in that respect are carried to a length to which few are prepared to follow him. There is something startling, though, when closely looked into, not Utopian or chimerical, in the amount of positive knowledge of the most varied kind which he believes may, by good methods of teaching, be made the common inheritance of all persons with ordinary faculties who are born ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... Paramount, the First (King of Utopia) Scaphio and Phantis (Judges of the Utopian Supreme Court) Tarara (The Public Exploder) Calynx ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... gigantic households are systematized to the beautiful smoothness of small ones; their phrase of "fare-well" is one of epicurean invitation, not of dismissal; while such are the combined luxuriousness and economy that, says one authority, "the modern London club is a realization of a Utopian coenobium,—a sort of lay convent, rivalling the celebrated Abbey of Theleme, with the agreeable motto of Fais ce que voudras, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... nevertheless to have manufactures, he wanted protection in the interest of self-sufficiency. When he could not find these conditions in the real world, he went passionately into the wilderness, and founded Utopian communities far from foreign contacts. His slogans reveal his prejudice. He is for Self-Government, Self-Determination, Independence. Not one of these ideas carries with it any notion of consent or community beyond the frontiers of the self-governing ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann |
