Utopia

(159 votes)   I shall speak of how melancholy and utopia preclude one another. How they fertilize one another... of the revulsion that follows one insight and precedes the next... of superabundance and surfeit. Of stasis in progress. And of myself, for whom melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.

Gunther Grass
1927-, German Author

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(152 votes)   Utopias are presented for our inspection as a critique of the human state. If they are to be treated as anything but trivial exercises of the imagination. I suggest there is a simple test we can apply. We must forget the whole paraphernalia of social description, demonstration, expostulation, approbation, condemnation. We have to say to ourselves, ''How would I myself live in this proposed society? How long would it be before I went stark staring mad?''

William Golding
1911-1993, British Author

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website