"Utopia" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... international peace at the close of the present terrible war, if we were to restore international law as it must be restored, we must find some way in which the united forces of the nations could be put behind the cause of peace and law. I said then that my hearers might think that I was picturing a Utopia, but it is in the search of Utopias that great discoveries are made. Not failure, but low aim, is the crime. This league certainly has the highest of all aims for the benefits of humanity, and because the pathway is sown with difficulties is no reason ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... to hammer that idea into his head. But of England he had no conception save as a mere geographical expression, a little bit of red on a map of Europe, a vague place where certain sections of the population clamoured for-much pay and little work. His dream was a parochial Utopia where the Irish peasant, the Welsh farmer and the Scottish crofter should live in luxury, and when these were satisfied, the English operative should live in moderate comfort. The Little Englander, in his insensate altruism, dreamed of ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... imaginary fancy of spiritual catholicity before my mind, which I supposed was something better than the fleshy spirituality of Methodism, to which I had taken a great dislike; but where to find this Utopia, or how to embody it, I knew not. These specimens of catholic people I certainly had no sympathy with; nor had I any patience with their hollow devotion and their studied imitation of Popery. I plainly saw that light could have no fellowship with ...
— From Death into Life - or, twenty years of my ministry • William Haslam
... stay in this Utopia of the plains, forever journeying together, and never reaching any troublesome futures where were laws and opinions by ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... proved that his visions are true, and that he is eager to bring society into harmony with them, what further charge remains against him? That he is "an ineffectual angel, beating his bright wings in the void." He may see a vision of Utopia, and long that men shall become citizens there, but the man who actually perfects human society is he who patiently toils at the "dim, vulgar, vast, unobvious work" [Footnote: See Sordello.] of the world, here amending a law, here building a settlement house, and so on. Thus the ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... "Enjoy your Utopia!" said he bitterly. "Do you fancy they acted up to their ideals? They dreamed of the Quest of the Sangreal: but which of them ever went ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... there is a craze in most women. They have such an obstinate faith in their own good intentions. If they find half a dozen fools to believe in them, they will start a crusade to found a new Utopia. Women are the most meddlesome things in creation: they never let well alone. Their pretty little fingers are in every human pie. That is why we get so much unwholesome crust and so little meat, and, of course, our digestion ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... excellent determination of goodness, what philosopher's counsel can so readily direct a prince as the feigned Cyrus in Xenophon? Or a virtuous man in all fortunes, as AEneas in Virgil? Or a whole commonwealth, as the way of Sir Thomas More's Utopia? I say the way, because where Sir Thomas More erred, it was the fault of the man, and not of the poet; for that way of patterning a commonwealth was most absolute, though he, perchance, hath not so absolutely performed it. For the ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... said, demanded, that their rulers should devote all their strength to "the divine blessing of freeing mankind from the slavery of war." ... "To those," he said, "who speak of the Society of Nations as an 'ideology' or 'Utopia' which has no hold over our people, we would reply: Have you been in the trenches among the soldiers waiting for the attack?" [Signor Bissolati had the unique record, among Allied or enemy statesmen, of having volunteered for active service, though past ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... the Toryism commonly displayed in country districts, it is yet preferable, from the point of view of those whose motto is aequam memento, etc., to the impossible Utopia which the advanced Radicals invariably promise us and ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... easy to multiply examples proving that as regards the material organization Fourier's dream was not a Utopia. ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... himself a centrifugalist or a centripetalist." To attain a society in which Individualism and Socialism are each carried to its extreme point would be to attain to the society that lived in the Abbey of Thelema, in the City of the Sun, in Utopia, in the land of Zarathustra, in the Garden of Eden, in the Kingdom of Heaven. It is a kingdom, no doubt, that is, as Diderot expressed it, "diablement ideal." But to-day we hold in our hands more certainly than ever before the clues that ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... Rossettis, spent the evening at their home, and went back to Oxford filled with the idea of Utopia, and that the old world would not find rest until it accepted the dictum of Mrs. Rossetti, "A ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... Christianity, the ideal of a life beyond death being "diametrically opposed to the ideal of Bolshevism, which tempts the masses by promising the immediate realisation of the earthly paradise." And, Bolshevism's practical method for realising its Utopia being "the armed conflict of classes . . . the dream of the earthly paradise, to be brought into being through civil war, becomes instantly the reality of hell let loose." After dwelling in detail on various aspects of the situation, the writer makes some statements which will be ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... pursuits of our posterity, whether the mind of nations will turn on philosophy or politics, whether on a descent to the centre of the earth, or on the model of a general Utopia—whether on a telegraphic correspondence with the new planet, by a galvanised wire two thousand eight hundred and fifty millions of miles long, or on a Chartist government—we have not the slightest reason to doubt, that ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... Utopia is charming, and the quasi-scientific detail of the expedition is given with so much integrity that we hardly wonder at the marvellous ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... animals killed are to be looked upon as common property of the tribe and not as a personal belonging of the man who kills them. Thus here, under the Northern Lights, do the Farthest North subjects of the Seventh Edward work out in deeds the dream of Sir Thomas More's crescent-isle of Utopia where men lived and worked as brothers, ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... predecessors. Whether, after this war, a League of Nations will be formed, and will be capable of performing this task, it is as yet impossible to foretell. However that may be, some method of preventing wars will have to be established before our Utopia becomes possible. When once men BELIEVE that the world is safe from war, the whole difficulty will be solved: there will then no longer be any serious resistance to the disbanding of national armies and navies, and the substitution for them of a small international force ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... suspicion of this would force itself upon him, perhaps he only clung to both the more tenaciously; but he was no blind theorist. He would reform the Church through the Church, and is less anxious for Italian independence than for Italian good government under an Emperor from Germany rather than from Utopia. ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... detached rock. These, from their resemblance to the "antiguas obras de Moros," which the muleteers used to point out, presented another feature strongly reviving my Spanish recollections. In the days of romance, this country must have been the Utopia of Troubadours, where each might in the compass of a short walk have taken morning draught, breakfast, nooning, dinner, and supper, at the strong holds of different barons. The first of these fortalices, called ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... characters never appear, and all who figure are so misunderstood and misrepresented, that the result is a complete mystification, and the perusal of the narrative about as profitable to an Englishman as reading the Republic of Plato or the Utopia of More, the pages of Gaudentio di Lucca or the adventures of ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... dear friend-the first KRIYA YOGI in America—discussed with me the need for world colonies founded on a spiritual basis. The ills attributed to an anthropomorphic abstraction called "society" may be laid more realistically at the door of Everyman. Utopia must spring in the private bosom before it can flower in civic virtue. Man is a soul, not an institution; his inner reforms alone can lend permanence to outer ones. By stress on spiritual values, self-realization, a colony exemplifying ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... naval station. There are 200,000 acres of productive soil on the islands, of which only a fifteenth is under cultivation, and of this large area 150,000 is said to be specially adapted for sugar culture. Herein is a prospective Utopia, and people are always dreaming of the sugar- growing capacities of the belt of rich disintegrated lava which slopes upwards from the sea to the bases of the mountains. Hitherto, sugar growing has been a very disastrous speculation, and few of the planters at present ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... upon we are making rapid progress, and with all the faults and errors of the outer world to guide us clear of dangers, I think that it will not be long before Pellucidar will become as nearly a Utopia as one may expect to ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... topos], sometimes called Nusquama) is a description, written in Latin, of an ideal commonwealth; in which More develops a number of very novel political ideas. The first book, which was written last, deals with the condition of England in his day; the description of Utopia ...
— Selections from Erasmus - Principally from his Epistles • Erasmus Roterodamus
... opportunities of contact with our politicians, administrators, and newspaper proprietors, or any chance of sharing or influencing their activities. But they shrank from that contact. They hated politics. They did not wish to realize Utopia for the common people: they wished to realize their favorite fictions and poems in their own lives; and, when they could, they lived without scruple on incomes which they did nothing to earn. The women in their ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... not mean book-speculator, does not smoke a pipe? I refuse to believe that any book-lover could possibly sit in an easy chair before the fire and pore over Browne's 'Hydriotaphia,' Sidney's 'Arcadia,' More's 'Utopia,' or Cotton's 'Montluc' (all in folio, please) without a pipe in his mouth. Why, it is unthinkable. Yet the books which treat of tobacco are not all couched in that tranquil tone which is induced by the soothing weed. 'The whole output of literature on ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... had served as a cloak for charlatans was the great aim of the time, and the method was to appeal from the professors of exploded technicalities to the judgment of cultivated men of the world. Berkeley places his Utopia in happy climes,— ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... dreaming dreams," raising his voice. "I have a real plan for you and me, lad. I have found the Utopia of the prophets and poets, an actual place, here in Pennsylvania. We will go there together, shut out the trade-world, and devote ourselves with these lofty enthusiasts to a life of purity, celibacy, meditation,—helpful and loving to the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... The "Utopia" of More is perhaps the best of its class. It is the work of a profound thinker, the suggestive speculations and ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... early socialist—imagine his elation! For he will regard our desire to transfer some of his own credit to the man in the pre-Elizabethan street as a sure sign that we are steadily approaching the golden gates of his Utopia. For good Sir Thomas knows that our view of heroes and hero-worship has always been too little democratic. We have been over-inclined, with the aristocratic Carlyle, to see all history as a procession of a few transcendent masters surrounded, ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... dwell in petty tribes, where all are equal except the women, who are slaves; where property is common, and where, consequently, there is no property at all; where one may recognize the Utopia of philosophers, and observe the saddest and basest ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... in the place of war and theology, meant the dawn of material prosperity, of the rule of law, and of a new intelligence diffused through the opinions and industries of men. Of this there is no better exposition than Sir Thomas More's "Utopia." More was a devout Catholic. He wore a hair shirt next his skin; he flogged himself; he gave his life for a theological principle. But he was also a Christian in a wider sense. He appreciated the importance to men of peace and happiness, as well as of orthodoxy. He sought ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... in which, from his secluded habits, he was not formed to shine. He became a dreamer. He formed a world for himself, and peopled it with beings whose imaginary perfections had no counterpart on earth. He went forth to mingle with his kind, and found them so unlike the creatures in his moral Utopia, that he determined to relinquish society and spiritualise his own nature, the better to fit him for his high calling as a minister of the gospel ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... a fact: no engineer has ever before had such resources to work with, on such a vast scale, and with such a free hand. We're laying the framework for a city of ten millions, all thoroughly systematized and efficient. There is no city in the world like it; it's an engineer's dream of Utopia." ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... MORE'S UTOPIA.—The most prominent literary figure of this period is Sir Thomas More. The work upon which his fame as a writer mainly rests is his Utopia, or "Nowhere," a political romance like Plato's Republic or Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia. ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... Utopia was written in the years 1515-16, when its author's age was about thirty-seven. He was a young man of twenty when Columbus first touched the continent named after the Florentine Amerigo Vespucci, who made his voyages to it in the years 1499-1503. More wrote his Utopia when imaginations ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... storages of force for every city, and for every house if required, and this force man will convert into heat, light, or motion, according to his needs. Is this Utopian? 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 looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress ...
— The Soul of Man • Oscar Wilde
... they are lazy or talkative, and sing songs. Piers succeeds in mastering them by the help of Hunger. Thanks to Hunger and Truth, distant possibilities are seen of a reform, of a future Golden Age, an island of England that shall be similar to the island of Utopia, imagined later ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... an American audience without bringing a cordial and generous response. All are not ready, of course, to carry into action, into life, legislation, and law the sentiments of liberty and justice they applaud; but they feel that somewhere, in some nameless Utopia far away, such things might be lived out. Thank heaven that Utopia is possible for humanity—a real, practical condition of our mortal life—only a little way ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... made here and there; nay, sometimes there are those who can say they have returned usury for every gift of fate; and would others make the same experiments, they might find Utopia not so far off as the children of this world, wise in securing their own selfish ease, would persuade us it must ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... been a gigantic Utopia. To every immigrant since the founding of Jamestown this coast has gleamed upon the horizon as a Promised Land. America, too, has provided convenient plots of ground, as laboratories for all sorts of vagaries, where, unhampered by restrictions and unannoyed ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... to veil the day; Beyond a realm of tears Utopia's land of promise lay; And not till later years I learned this lesson—that to win Results from labor sure, "Reformers" always must begin Among ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... yet these you run over with a glance of cool contempt, and say we have nothing in the Exhibition! Is this kind or politic treatment of the supporters of your policy in the States? If a seeming approximation to your Utopia should subject them to such compliments, what may they expect from its perfect consummation? Let all our States become as purely Agricultural as the Carolinas or the lower valley of the Mississippi, and what would then be your estimation ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book-friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness. The things I have learned and the things I have been taught seem of ridiculously ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... accessible to all—to break down that barrier which in the Middle Ages was set between clerk and layman, and which in the intermediate period has arisen between the intelligent and ignorant classes. Whether the Utopia of a modern world in which all men shall enjoy the same social, political, and intellectual advantages be realized or not, we cannot doubt that the whole movement of humanity, from the Renaissance onward, has tended in this direction. To destroy the distinctions, mental and physical, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... not labour in Utopia on schemes, but in Britain on real business; and the inquiry is, how a nation, situated as this is, and having more than its share of power, importance, and ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... Jacqueline, "a foot of land to be free on. But you know, messieurs, that Utopia is an ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... way as to intercept all communication of the gods with their worshippers on earth. All steam of sacrifice will be prevented from rising to Olympus, and the Immortals will very soon be starved into an acceptance of any terms proposed. The new Utopia is duly constructed, and the daring plan to secure the sovereignty is in a fair way to succeed. Meantime various quacks and charlatans, each with a special scheme for improving things, arrive from earth, and are one after the other exposed and dismissed. ...
— The Birds • Aristophanes
... Strictly speaking, no one has a right to express any opinion about such complex and incomprehensible aggregations of humanity as the United States of America or the British Empire. Humanly speaking, they both are impossible. Antecedently to experience the Constitution of Utopia as expounded by Sir Thomas More would be much more probable. It has a certain rational coherence. If it existed at all it would hang together, being made out of whole cloth. But how does the British Empire hold together? It seems to be made of shreds and patches. It is full of anomalies ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... wilderness. A few months since, 'Democracy on its trial,' was the favorite theme of democracy-haters in Europe. The indictment against our free institutions was freighted with fearful charges. The government of the Union was a 'delusive Utopia.' 'The people of the North had degenerated into a mob.' 'Society was drifting into the maelstrom of anarchy, and law and order becoming extinct.' A little time, and an apparently unwarlike people ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... State" was not a dogmatic finality. Most of the plans for settlement and migration are improvisations. The pamphlet was not a rigid plan or a blueprint. It was not a description of a Utopia, although some parts of it give that impression. It had an indicated destiny but was not bound by a rigid line. It was the illumination of a dynamic thought and followed the light with the hope that it might lead to fulfillment. There was room for detours and variations. ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl
... her. This, and her domestic duties, and the care of her little sickly baby, helped to keep her mind from dwelling on the weather, except, of course, to hope that he was safely harbored with the logs at Utopia in the dreary distance. But she noticed that day, when she went out to feed the chickens and look after the cow, that the tide was up to the little fence of their garden patch, and the roar of the surf on the south beach, though miles away, she could hear distinctly. And she began ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... indeed, that the freedom of trade should ever be entirely restored in Great Britain, is as absurd as to expect that an Oceana or Utopia should ever be established in it. Not only the prejudices of the public, but, what is much more unconquerable, the private interests of many individuals, irresistibly oppose it. Were the officers of the army to ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... indelible impression on Robert's mind. The way was so simple, so clear, so sure, that if only men like Hardie could go round every town and village in the land, he believed that a Utopia might be brought into being in a very few years; that even the rich people, the usurpers, would agree that this state of affairs might be brought about, and that they'd gladly give up all they had of power over the lives ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... tongues, but he preached to the men who did the work. The perfections of Genevan Church discipline delighted him. "Manners and religion so sincerely reformed I have not yet seen in any other place." The genius of Calvin had made Geneva a kind of Protestant city state [Greek text]; a Calvinistic Utopia—everywhere the vigilant eyes of the preachers and magistrates were upon every detail of daily life. Monthly and weekly the magistrates and ministers met to point out each other's little failings. Knox felt as if he were indeed in the City ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... France to Vienna, in order to try to learn what reputation Count Larinski had left there. He is esteemed there as a most worthy man; as an inventor who was more daring than wise; as a devoted patriot; as one of those Poles whose only thought is of Poland and of their Utopia, and who would set fire to the four corners of the earth without wincing, for the sole purpose of procuring embers at which to roast their chestnuts. I will not return to the subject of the gun; you know all about it. It seems that there was some good in this ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... vile and most bestial in this miserable, misguided people struggling for Utopia and Liberty, seemed to come to the surface, whilst listening to the reading of this ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... I have much faith in the capacity or honesty of the mass of Radical voters. If I found myself at one of the clubs of which Glazzard speaks, I should very likely get hooted down as an insolent aristocrat. I don't go in for crazy extremes. There'll never be a Utopia, and it's only a form of lying to set such ideals before the multitude. I believe in the distinction of classes; the only class I would altogether abolish is that of the hungry and the ragged. So long as nature doles out the gift of brains in different proportions, there must exist ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... philosophy, indeed, points to ulterior ends, but even those ends are all practical; and if you desert the conditions of reality, or of common probability, you may show forth your eloquence or your fancy, but the utmost you can produce will be a Utopia or Oceana. ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... of life, that Anderson found the strength to settle accounts with—but also to release his affection for—the world of small-town America. The dream of an unconditional personal freedom, that hazy American version of utopia, would remain central throughout Anderson's life and work. It was an inspiration; it ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... to do what is best for themselves and least harmful for others. The average man now has intelligence enough: Utopia is not far off, if the self-appointed folk who rule us, and teach us for a consideration, would only be willing to do unto others as they would be done by, that is to say, mind their own business ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... goodness, her wayward ignorance. And a very charming ideal for England must she have been, and a very natural one, when a young girl sat even on the throne. But no nation can keep its ideal for ever, and it needed none of Mr. Gilbert's delicate satire in 'Utopia' to remind us that she had passed out of our ken with the rest of the early Victorian era. What writer of plays, as lately asked some pressman, who had been told off to attend many first nights and knew what he was talking about, ever dreams of making ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... discovered, however, that the future would not permit itself to be shelved in this offhand fashion; there were certain problems that persisted in thrusting themselves upon her notice with increasing frequency, and one of them was—marriage! The idea of creating a Utopia necessarily included that of establishing the home life and domestic happiness. There were two men in particular who forced her to give some thought to this detail, one of whom was Wilde, and the other an able seaman ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... must therefore be employed to oppose these visionary schemes. They must be publicly denounced as what they really are—as an unhealthy and feeble Utopia, or a cloak for political machinations. Our people must learn to see that the maintenance of peace never can or may be the goal of a policy. The policy of a great State has positive aims. It will endeavour to attain this by pacific measures so long as that is possible and profitable. It must ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... province of woman to enter into Political life. Plato, indeed, admitted this sex to an equal share with man in the dignities and offices of his commonwealth. But we should remember his was an imaginary state, an Utopia, not a part of our plain, practical world. I do not forget here the long line of Queens that grace the annals of history; yet what had they achieved, wreaths though they wore on their brows, had not man been usually the prime minister and controlling agent in their governments? ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... marry the Bertie Adamses of their acquaintance and not the stockbrokers, butchers, drapers, bookies, professional cricketers or pugilists. They would then become the mothers of the salvation-generation of the British people which will found and rule Utopia. ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... Whether, as others have supposed an Atlantis or Utopia, we also may not suppose an Hyperborean island inhabited ...
— The Querist • George Berkeley
... to satisfy the legitimate hopes of the human race, that it is bad philosophy, and that it is flatly contrary to what science tells us of the destiny of the world and of mankind. The human spirit beats against the bars of space and time themselves, and could never be satisfied with any earthly utopia. Our true home must be in some higher sphere of existence, above the contradictions which make it impossible for us to believe that time and space are ultimate realities, and out of reach of the inevitable catastrophe which the next glacial age must bring upon the human ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... press in the greatest abhorrence. Nobody is more conscious than I am of the splendid abilities of the Honourable Mover, but I tell him at once, his scheme is too good to be practicable. It savours of Utopia. It looks well in theory, but it won't do in practice. It will not do, I repeat, Sir, in practice; and so the advocates of the measure will find, if, unfortunately, it should find its way through Parliament. (Cheers.) The source of that corruption ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... the house, Ruth's first glance was at the hall table, but there was no important-looking yellow envelope to suggest that her cablegram had arrived. Then her eye fell on the evening paper; perhaps that might tell that the "Utopia" was safely in port. She started to turn to the shipping news, but her gaze was caught by a headline on the first page, and she stood rigid, holding the paper in her shaking hands and trying to make sense of what she ...
— Glenloch Girls • Grace M. Remick
... anybody has ever made a list of the books that Coleridge did not write. It would be the catalogue of a most interesting library in Utopia. ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... France, and published a history of the French Revolution in four volumes; and the next year issued a book somewhat famous in its day—the voyage to Icaria. In this romance he described a communistic Utopia, whose terms he had dreamed out; and he began at once to try to realize his dream. He framed a constitution for an actual Icaria; sought for means and members to establish it; selected Texas as its field of operations, and early in 1848 actually persuaded a number of persons to set ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... & Montana and Butte & Boston, after long delay, drew out of the "Standard Oil" station as the second section of Amalgamated, carrying an immense load of investors and speculators to what was at that time confidently believed would be Dollar Utopia; and the price of the enlarged Amalgamated fairly flew to 130. These were the stocks which I had originally advertised would be part of the first section of the consolidated "Coppers," and which, after Amalgamated had been run in ahead of them, I advertised ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... a spirit of compromise," he returned. "We've differed widely on this question of a greater canal. You have evolved a plan best suited to Utopia; my own is aimed to meet the human nature I know best—the human nature De Witt Clinton, in whose steps you evidently aspire to tread, comprehended and took into the reckoning. Be practical as he ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... "Of Utopia!" exclaimed Morris. "Hamilton, you are the least visionary man in this country, but you are God knows how many years ahead of your times. If we are ever on two legs again, you will put us there; but ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... Utopia of More, the belle ile of Rousseau, the Eden with no serpent or hurtful apple, the garden of the Hesperides, in harmony with nature, in freedom from the galling bonds of government and church, of convention and clothing. The reports of the English missionaries of the nakedness and ungodliness of ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... of his last books Donnelly presages later futurist works such as "Brave New World" and "1984". The original scans and OCR were provided by Mr. J.B. Hare; for further information about Donnelly and this book see http://www.sacred-texts.com/utopia/cc/index.htm. There is only one ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... human progress, and how blind they were to the fact that it has a certain connection with environment. You must remember that ever since that large and, as some still think, rather tragic occurrence environment has been very dicky and Utopia not unrelated to thin air. It has been perceived time and again that the leaders of public opinion are not always confirmed by events. The new world, which was so sapiently prophesied by rhetoricians, is now nigh thirty years ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... with continental art, but also from the very fact of her being an English wife and mother. Women ought, perhaps, always to make the best critics—at once more quicksighted, more tasteful, more sympathetic than ourselves, whose proper business is creation. Perhaps in Utopia they will take the reviewer's business entirely off our hands, as they are said to be doing already, by-the-bye, in one leading periodical. But of all critics an English matron ought to be the best—open as she should be, by her womanhood, to all tender and admiring sympathies, accustomed ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... consider the attitude of resignation to the will of God, which was characteristic of medieval Christianity. As we saw in our first lecture, the medieval age did not think of human life upon this earth in terms of progress. The hopes of men did not revolve about any Utopia to be expected here. History was not even a glacier, moving slowly toward the sunny meadows. It did not move at all; it was not intended to move; it was standing still. To be sure, the thirteenth century was one ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... of that problem is only partly in the hands of the politician; that is one of the reasons why it is extremely difficult to suggest an industrial policy which is going to hold out the hope of reaching Utopia in a short time. But it is obviously essential somehow or another to develop, particularly among employers, the sense of trusteeship—the sense that a man who controls a large amount of capital is in fact not merely an individual pursuing his own fortune, but is taking the very great responsibility ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... country. Of the latter, the vast majority was given by artisans and landless rural labourers. The peasant, like every property-owner, is an enemy of fantastic schemes of confiscation and of general plunder lavishly embellished with promises of Utopia. Therefore Social-Democrats will rather see the countryside of Great Britain turned into a wilderness than see ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... More had given a striking picture of their miserable condition in his "Utopia," a book in which he urged the government to consider measures for their relief; but the evil had since become much worse. Farmers, having discovered that wool growing was more profitable than the raising of grain, had turned ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... about the tactics of Fourieristic-phalanxes, but believe a phalange is a community or association of about eighteen hundred persons, who were supposed or intended to practice the Fourieristic doctrines. In fine, a phalange is a sort of French Utopia." ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... book: "Political Justice." It is a work so high and noble in its outlook that only a Utopia could ever realize its ideals. When men are everywhere willing to give to other men all the rights they demand for themselves, and co-operation takes the place of competition, then will Godwin's philosophy ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... member of the University of Cambridge, where I shall take my degree of A. M. this term; but were reasoning, eloquence, or virtue, the objects of my search, Granta is not their metropolis, nor is the place of her situation an 'El Dorado,' far less an Utopia. The intellects of her children are as stagnant as her Cam, and their pursuits limited to the church—not of Christ, but ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... grasp all States save its own, Plato withdraws his eyes from the world, to open them in his dreamy "Atlantis." Just in the grimmest period of English history, with the axe hanging over his head, Sir Thomas More gives you his "Utopia." Just when the world is to be the theatre of a new Sesostris, the sages of France tell you that the age is too enlightened for war, that man is henceforth to be governed by pure reason, and live in a paradise. Very pretty reading all this to a man like me, Lenny, who can admire and smile ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... telegram to Halbert Donovan: "Rain. Pastures coming out green. Dwarfed grain can make feed in the straw. My flax making part crop. Dams full of water. Fall fallowing begun." In hilarious mood I signed it "Utopia." ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... of the barn where his son DeWitt, who died, had carved his initials. He would never allow that spot to be touched, it was sacred to the memory of what was perhaps the most absorbing affection of his life. He always called East Hampton his earthly paradise, which to him meant a busy Utopia. He was very fond of the sea bathing, and his chief recreation was running on the beach. He was 65 years old, yet he could run like a young man. These few ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... weakness; his pleasant little vanity, and desire that his village should admire him; his simple scheme of good in which everybody was to be happy—no beggar was to be refused his dinner—nobody in fact was to work much, and he to be the harmless chief of the Utopia, and the monarch of the Irish Yvetot. He would have told again, and without fear of their failing, those famous jokes(185) which had hung fire in London; he would have talked of his great friends of the Club—of my Lord Clare and my ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... father to Rodin, "I had not considered all the dangerous consequences of this association, recommended by M. de Rennepont. I believe that the heir, from the characters we know them to be possessed of, would wish to realize this Utopia. The peril is great and pressing; what is to ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... refused to rob from women and children; Captain Bellamy, the proletarian revolutionist; and captain North, whose sense of justice and honesty was a rebuke to the corruption of government under Walpole. But the fictional Captain Misson, the founder of a communist utopia, is by far the most original ...
— Of Captain Mission • Daniel Defoe
... an Utopia governed by an aristocracy that should be really democratic, which should use, under developed forms, that method which made the mediaeval priesthood the one great democratic institution of old Christendom; bringing to the surface and ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... Hall. The writer has plainly made up his mind that the time has at last come for dropping all the discreet machinery of apologue and parable, and giving to his words the edge of a sharpened sword. The vague disguises of political speculation, and the mannered reservations of a Utopia or New Atlantis, are exchanged for a passionate, biting, and loudly practical indictment. All over the world men are under the yoke of masters who neglect the instruction of their people, or only seek to cheat and deceive them. The sovereigns in every part of the globe are unjust, ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... refuse to do so are punished, or are crushed. If society were perfect, the imperfect tendency would carry itself out till the two sets of laws were identical; but perfection so far has been only in Utopia, and, as far as we can judge by experience hitherto, they have approximated most nearly in the simplest and most rudimentary forms of life. Under the systems which we call patriarchal, the modern ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... always loved so well? May I not throw over the story of his college days the rosy colourings of romance and fancy, the warm sunshine of prosperity and hope? I wish I might. But I am writing of Camford—not of a divine Utopia ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... read Teverino and Le Secretaire Intime. Poor M. Caro! This spirit, which he treats with such airy flippancy, is the very leaven of modern life. It is remoulding the world for us and fashioning our age anew. If it is antediluvian, it is so because the deluge is yet to come; if it is Utopian, then Utopia must be added to our geographies. To what curious straits M. Caro is driven by his violent prejudices may be estimated by the fact that he tries to class George Sand's novels with the old Chansons de geste, the stories of adventure characteristic of primitive literatures; ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... writers consider, moreover, that their conception is not a Utopia, constructed on the a priori method, after a few desiderata have been taken as postulates. It is derived, they maintain, from an analysis of tendencies that are at work already, even though state socialism ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... degree, he never sought "by indirections to find directions out." In statesmanship— in all that pertained to human affairs—he was intensely practical. With him, in the words of Macaulay, "one acre in Middlesex is worth a principality in Utopia." ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... pure and all self-dependent intellect, the greater our chance of happiness. Thus you denied that we were rendered happier by our luxuries, by our ambition, or by our affections. Love and its ties were banished from your solitary Utopia. And you asserted that the true wisdom of life lay solely in the cultivation—not of our feelings, but our faculties. You know, I held a different doctrine: and it is with the natural triumph of a hostile partizan, that ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... tools, merchandise, new vegetables, fruits, and animals: in short, a philosophy which will "not raise us above vulgar wants, but will supply those wants." "And as an acre in Middlesex is worth more than a principality in Utopia, so the smallest practical good is better than any magnificent effort to realize an impossibility;" and "hence the first shoemaker has rendered more substantial service to mankind than all the sages of Greece. All they could do was to fill the world with long beards and long words; whereas ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... comedy, than to be tickled by a surgeon, when he's letting 'em blood.' Something more than a half-truth is in Charles Lamb's theory, that the old comedy 'has no reference whatever to the world that is': that it is 'the Utopia of Gallantry' merely. Literally, historically, the theory is a fantasy. What the Restoration dramatists did not borrow from France was inspired directly by the court of Charles the Second, and nobody conversant with the memoirs of that court can have any ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... October, 1875, there was published an unsigned three-page article entitled, "The Curious Republic of Gondour." In this article was developed the idea that the voting privilege should be estimated not by the individuals, but by their intellectual qualifications. The republic of Gondour was a Utopia, where this plan had ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... of it. It had brought out in them every instinct of chivalry and kindness, it had developed in them every tendency towards high-mindedness and idealism. Angel Island would be an Atlantis, an Eden, an Arden, an Arcadia, a Utopia, a Milleamours, a Paradise, the Garden of Hesperides. Into it the Golden Age would come again. They drew glowing pictures of the wonderful friendships that would grow up on Angel Island between them and their beautiful ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... further and put into the same class all those radicals who wish simply to substitute some other kind of machine for the one we have. Though not all of them would accept the name, these reformers are simply utopia-makers in action. Their perceptions are more critical than the ordinary conservatives'. They do see that humanity is badly squeezed in the existing mould. They have enough imagination to conceive a different one. But they have ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... make you all look so curious," she laughed. "It's only that I can't have many more parties with you, because my father has sent for me, and I am to sail on the 'Utopia' a month ...
— Glenloch Girls • Grace M. Remick
... a plan, which you in your wisdom can modify, improve, perfect. In this I know we are of one mind, that though the ideal we all of us hold be never reached during our lives, we shall continue to work successfully for its realisation. Utopia itself is but another word for time; and some day the masses, who now heed us not, or smile incredulously at our proceedings, will awake to our conceptions. Then our knowledge, like light rapidly conveyed from one torch to another, will bury us in ...
— Hygeia, a City of Health • Benjamin Ward Richardson
... for Utopia, think what a man's youth might be. I suppose not one in every thousand uses half the possibilities of natural joy and delightful effort which lie in those years between seventeen and seven- and-twenty. All but all men have to look back ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... first thing a man learns about, but with some such thing as protoplasm, which is about the last. The one defect in his splendid mental equipment is that he does not sufficiently allow for the stuff or material of men. In his new Utopia he says, for instance, that a chief point of the Utopia will be a disbelief in original sin. If he had begun with the human soul—that is, if he had begun on himself—he would have found original sin almost the first thing to be believed in. He ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... not deem it a matter of duty to exult over the ruin of our republican edifice. Fear actuates the less enlightened; jealousy is the motive of the more liberal. A celebrated statesman once said to me, "A republic is theoretically a very fine thing, but it is a Utopia." Like the man in antiquity, who, on hearing motion denied, refuted the assertion simply by rising and walking, we had hitherto put the "Utopia" into practice; and the thing did march on, and proved a reality. The argument was peremptory. A principle can ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... Utopia-making is among the easiest and most fascinating of all intellectual occupations. Few employments which can be called intellectual are easier than that of devising panaceas for the ills of society, of demonstrating on paper how the rough places of life may be made plain and its crooked ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... actualities of to-day. I have no preconceived theories, and I flatter myself I am singularly free from prejudices. I am ready to sit at the feet of any who will show me any good. I keep my mind open on all these subjects; and am quite prepared to hail with open arms any Utopia that is offered me. But it must be within range of my finger-tips. It is of no use to me if it is in the clouds. Cheques on the Bank of Futurity I accept gladly enough as a free gift, but I can hardly be expected to take them ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... discipline. A child must be restrained. Whenever a crop of unrestrained youngsters takes the reins I fear they will make this country one of their much talked of Utopias. It was an unrestricted bunch that made a "Utopia" out of Russia. ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... atmosphere of mystery surrounding the wizard, opened the way for more notorious appeals to the popular taste for personal scandal. In the once well known "Memoirs of a Certain Island adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia" (1725-6) and the no less infamous "Secret History of the Present Intrigues of the Court of Carimania" (1727) Mrs. Haywood found a fit repertory for daringly licentious gossip of the sort made fashionable reading by Mrs. Manley's "Atalantis." But though the romans a clef of Mrs. Haywood, like the ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... wyselye played theyr partes, purgatory paradventure had served them yet another yere; neyther had it so sone haue bene quenched, nor the poor soule and proctoure there ben wyth his bloudye byshoppe christen catte so farre coniured into his owne Utopia with a sachel about his necke to gather for the proud prystes in ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.03.23 • Various
... it to the satisfaction of the scientific world. When he applies it to sociology our Bellamys are looking backward to Sir Thomas More, and expect a sudden transformation to a Utopia, not unlike the change which the good old preachers used to tell us we would experience "in ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... is capable of becoming. Other sciences deal with things as they are, and formulate the laws which they find to prevail in things as they are. The eyes of education are fixed always upon the future, and philosophy of whatever kind, directly adumbrates a Utopia, thinks on ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... far behind us; we were both far away in that Utopia where mind penetrates mind, heart understands heart. We heard neither the squeaking of a swing beneath us, nor the shouts of laughter along the promenades, nor the sound of a band tuning up in a neighboring pavilion. Our eyes, raised to heaven, failed to see the night ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... credulous of "secret" news from Moscow, and skeptical of every one's opinion but their own, were bolsheviking Marxian Utopia beneath a screen of such arrogant innocence that even the streetcorner police constables suspected them. And Mustapha Kemal, in Anatolia, was rumoured to be preparing a holy war. It was known as a Ghazi in those days. He had ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... tradition to have existed in the ocean W. of the Pillars of Hercules; Plato has given a beautiful picture of this island, and an account of its fabulous history. THE NEW, a Utopia figured as existing somewhere in the Atlantic, which Lord Bacon began to ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... the observer noted, "are some of brass, some of marble and touchstone, some of cedar and other special woods, gilt and adorned, some of iron, some of silver, some of gold." No other external recognition of great intellectual service was deemed, in Bacon's Utopia, of equal appropriateness. Bacon's mature judgment deserves greater regard than the splendid imagery of Milton's ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... with any Utopia. As long as he occurs, there's trouble and all the latent evil that makes a crowd list and ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... Brotherhood of the South Sea Islands.' A year before they had sailed away from San Francisco in a wretched old crate of a schooner, named the Percy Edward (an ex-Tahitian mail packet), to seek for an island or islands whereon they were to found a Socialistic Utopia, where they were to pluck the wild goat by the beard, pay no rent to the native owners of the soil, and, letting their hair grow down their backs, lead an idyllic life and loaf around generally. Such a mad ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... the hero of whose Socialistic Utopia had so oddly anticipated this actual experience. But here was no Utopia, no Socialistic state. He had already seen enough to realise that the ancient antithesis of luxury, waste and sensuality on the one hand and abject poverty ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... Ulysses of Cratinus, a burlesque of the Odyssey. But, in order of time, no play of Cratinus could belong to the Middle Comedy; for his death is mentioned by Aristophanes in his Peace. And as to the drama of Eupolis, in which he described what we call an Utopia, or Lubberly Land, what else was it but a parody of the poetical legends of the golden age? But in Aristophanes, not to mention his parodies of so many tragic scenes, are not the Heaven-journey of Trygaeus, and the Hell-journey of Bacchus, ludicrous ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... sensations with sincerity, if I did not touch in passing the note of something unearthly about that vast system to an insular traveller who sees it for the first time. It is as if he were wandering in another world among the fixed stars; or worse still, in an ideal Utopia of ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton |
