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More "Utopian" Quotes from Famous Books



... realised he explained it in an article and left others to make the first effort at realisation. The man who created Bayreuth was not the man to imagine altogether vainly that he could, per favour of a king, whom he must have known to be utterly weak, turn some millions of citizens and villagers into an Utopian nation of art-lovers and so on. But hatred surrounded him everywhere; the machinery of the state came early to a standstill, and, finally, the king had to ask him to withdraw for ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman

... 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 of the Christian rule of life,—the hesitating, speculative ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers

... the best path to religious belief. Almost alone amongst his class, he was far-sighted enough to perceive, at any rate in the latter years of his life, that the only hope of New Zealand lay in annexation, and that any dream of a Protestant Paraguay was Utopian. Quite naturally, but most unfortunately, most missionaries thought otherwise, and were at the outset of colonization placed in antagonism to the pioneers. Meanwhile they taught the elements of a rough-and-ready civilization, which the chiefs ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves

... peculiar astonishment was, that Jews, Protestants, and Catholics, all flocked alike, and frequently, at the SAME TIME, to exercise their particular forms of worship within this church!—a circumstance, almost partaking of the felicity of an Utopian commonwealth. I observed, indeed, a small crucifix upon the altar, which confirmed me in the belief that the Lutheran worship, according to the form of the Augsbourg confession, was practised here; and the verger told me ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... healthful but unflattering realism of Jeremias Gotthelf (1797-1854), and chosen, 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 the Inferno. There ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... peace with Germany, that the time would come when they would be trying to buy peace from ourselves. As I went out I saw another unhappy figure, unhappy for quite different reasons. Angelica Balabanova, after dreaming all her life of socialism in the most fervent Utopian spirit, had come at last to Russia to find that a socialist state was faced with difficulties at least as real as those which confront other states, that in the battle there was little sentiment and much cynicism, and that dreams worked out in terms of humanity ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome

... constituent parts would feel inwardly, and what physical and moral effects a battle would have upon those civilians who inhabited and owned the battlefield. Whether or no the future will prove the truth of the author's somewhat Utopian conclusions, he certainly founds them upon a most exciting and convincing story, in which the "love interest" is as ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 15, 1914 • Various

... the second place that Jesus had a social ideal, the Reign of God on earth, in which God's will would be done. This ideal with him was not a Utopian and academic fancy, but the great prize and task of life toward which he launched all his energies. He called men to turn away from the evil ways of the old order, and to get a mind fit for the new. He set the ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch

... strengthened man's heart (and bologna-sausages, gammons of bacon, or what you will, else) this also is a symbol and a sacrament. And it is indeed more, for one must remember that Rabelais was a great doctor of medicine, as well as of Utopian Theology—and the stomach, with the wise indulgence thereof, is the final master of all arts! Let it be understood that in Rabelais sex is treated with the same reverence, and the same humor, as meat and wine. ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys

... Academy of Music was but a fleeting incident, memorable only for the protestations with which it was begun and for its brevity. For the famous Norwegian violinist it was a Utopian dream with a speedy and rude awakening. After he had retired the Lagrange troupe came from downtown and completed the season with the help of the stockholders, and Maretzek, the erstwhile impresario and lessee, became the conductor. For four years, 1855, 1856, 1857, and 1858, the Academy ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... their successor, and so did holy men of old decide controversies too subtle for them; and we will not be ashamed to follow their example. For my part, I have often said to Sidney and to Spenser, when we have babbled together of Utopian governments in days which are now dreams to me, that I would have all officers of state chosen by lot out of the wisest and most fit; so making sure that they should be called by God, and not by man alone. Gentlemen, do you agree ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley

... far the stronger nature of the two: he was content to be himself without regard to his brother. But Nevitt didn't say so. Indeed, why should he? He merely went on playing a few disconnected bars of a very lively, hopeful utopian sort of a tune—a tune all youth and health, and go and gaiety—as he interjected from time to time some brief financial remarks on the numerous good strokes he'd pulled off of late in his transactions ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen

... progressive in appearance, than encouragement of labor and of industry? There is no democrat who does not consider it one of the finest attributes of power, no utopian theorist who does not place it in the front rank as a means of organizing happiness. Now, government is by nature so incapable of directing labor that every reward bestowed by it is a veritable larceny from the common treasury. M. Reybaud shall ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon

... "Utopian but foolish," Sir Timothy declared. "All the same, Mr. Ledsam, let me tell you this. You have a curious attraction for me. When I was asked why I had invited you to The Sanctuary last night, I frankly could not answer the question. I didn't know. I don't know. Your dislike ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... of the Girondins, and of the pure, altruistic, Utopian Republicanism for which they stood; and whilst he lived and laboured, their own endeavours to influence the people were all in vain. From his vile lodging in the Rue de l'Ecole de Medecine in Paris he span with his clever, ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini

... of Baltimore, Maryland, went early in 1915 with a message of fellowship from English people to German people. There was some surprise, some tendency to view the message as Utopian, but always a cordial acknowledgment and a real goodwill. Dr. Siegmund Schulze was most heartily in sympathy. "He feels that the ultimate hope of peace lies in the increasing use of arbitration." ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton

... to brag of, and willingly would she support the right woman for President. If Victoria lived up to the high standard of the Woodhull Memorial, then even she might be that woman. After all, it was an era of radical theories and Utopian dreams, of extravagances of every sort. ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz

... by a belief in good old days and an unconscious appreciation of 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 in ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard

... France than M. Necker. It was he who brought about the Revolution. You, Monsieur de Stael, did not see this; but I did. I witnessed all that passed in those days of terror and public calamity. But as long as I live those days shall never return. Your speculators trace their Utopian schemes upon paper; fools read and believe them. All are babbling about general happiness, and presently the people have not bread to eat; then comes a revolution. Such is usually the fruit of all these fine theories! Your grandfather was the cause ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne

... begun to enumerate them. Take, for instance, that old pacifist gag, that Utopian dream that is crystallized in the words: 'The road to universal peace.' All the long years when we were not bothered by wars or rumors of wars, other nations were whittling each other to pieces. And these agonized neighbors, longing, with a great longing, for world-peace, ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne

... 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 ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace

... 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 ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys

... Then, again, the duration of the republics of antiquity, compared with that of monarchies, was very short. Republics are very easy to found, and very difficult to maintain, while with monarchies it is exactly the reverse. If it is Utopian schemes that are wanted, I say this: the only solution of the problem would be a despotism of the wise and the noble, of the true aristocracy and the genuine nobility, brought about by the method ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer

... than ever the influences of tradition, and in their Utopian visions even wished to see the perfected race severed in its perfection from the memories of humanity, and from kinship with ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers

... keeping carefully aloof from all such damaging connection as the Credit Mobilier, and having its books always thrown open for public inspection, its reputation even to-day is excellent and continually improving in the popular estimation. Holding out no utopian inducements to catch the unwary, and making no wheedling promises to blind the guileless, it states its great objects with all their great advantages, without at the same time suppressing its enormous and perhaps ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne

... designed to embarrass the Government of the United States in the august and solemn championship of human liberty committed to its charge. And let it be remarked that our expectations of English approval were never Utopian. The great principle involved in the American contest was so far above the level of the ordinary pursuits of men, that, even among ourselves, few have been able to transfuse it into their daily consciousness. We never looked to England for the encouragement of a popular enthusiasm,—hardly, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various

... preliminary conversation between its characters he denounced the killing of men for any sort of thefts. Now you no longer put men to death for theft; you look back upon that cruel code of your mother England with an abhorrence as great as his own. We, for our part, who have realized the Utopian dream of brotherly equality, look back with the same abhorrence upon a state where some were rich and some poor, some taught and some untaught, some high and some low, and the hardest toil often failed to supply a sufficiency of the food which luxury ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells

... 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, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... to bring the realisation home to others. Yet all earthly evils have their compensations, and even monotony is not without its secret joy. For a time we drop out of the larger world, with its interests and its obligations, and become the independent citizens of a tiny State:—a Utopian State where few toil and none go hungry—bounded on all sides by the sea and vassal only to the winds and waves. Here during a period which is too long while it lasts, too short when it is over, we may placidly ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill

... 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 ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele

... 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 established ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope

... is said by good authorities to have worked well. It is not a socialistic or Utopian scheme, but frankly accepts existing conditions and tries to make the best of them. It is not by any means merely "playing at house." The children have to do genuine work, and learn habits of real industry, thrift, self-restraint, ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead

... alone!' But good or no, the arrangement of One planet, One inhabitant, already seems to me, not merely a natural and proper, but the only natural and proper, condition; so much so, that any other arrangement has now, to my mind, a certain improbable, wild, and far-fetched unreality, like the Utopian schemes of dreamers and faddists. That the whole world should have been made for me alone—that London should have been built only in order that I might enjoy the vast heroic spectacle of its burning—that all history, ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel

... progress, more conscious of the needs of a distant future, perhaps, or even of an ideal of universal efficiency as a means of realizing some one world purpose or many good purposes. This is not now, as it once might have been called, merely an Utopian dream. In some slight degree it is already being accomplished. Fifth, social and moral feelings are widened in scope, and must be still further extended; it is in the form of the democratic spirit, that these feelings must find expression. And this democratic spirit ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge

... last paragraph is to be attained, and to add that the difficulty of carrying so laudable a proposal into effect lies wholly in the details, and therefore that until some working plan is suggested, the consideration of improving the human race is Utopian. But this requirement is not altogether fair, because if a persuasion of the importance of any end takes possession of men's minds, sooner or later means are found by which that end is carried into ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton

... fervidly pious, he yet refused to acknowledge a Supreme Providence, and substituted some airy abstraction of 'Universal Love' in its place. An aristocrat by birth, and, as I understand, also in appearance and manners, he was yet a leveller in politics, and to such an utopian extent as to be the serious advocate of a community of goods. Though benevolent and generous to an extent that seemed to exclude all idea of selfishness, he yet scrupled not, in the pride of system, to disturb wantonly the faith of his fellow-men, and, without substituting ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli

... world-embracing society, held together by love, was not dreamt of before the Gospel came; and since the Gospel came it is more than a dream. If you wrench away the idea from its foundation, as people do who talk about fraternity, and seek to bring it to pass without Christ, it is a mere piece of Utopian sentiment—a fine dream. But in Christianity it worked. It works imperfectly enough, God knows. Still there is some reality in it, and some power. The Gospel first of all produced the thing and the practice, and then the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren

... Conciergerie. He had brought with him a head crammed with schemes for the political regeneration of the whole world, and a trunkful of French fashions, neither of which, as I reckoned, were likely to take much with us. He made me laugh inwardly twenty times a-day by his Utopian theories and fancies. Truth to tell, in matters of politics or of sound common sense, these Frenchmen are for the most part mere children, and reach their dying day without ever becoming men. Take them by their weak points, their unlimited vanity or their love of what they call ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various

... his criminal tendencies, because he is a specialist in his own particular 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 of you. ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard

... you do not know them—and how could you?—you, a man who lived the greater part of your life in a monastery apart from your fellows, apart from the problems, apart from the battle against conditions that make men—men. You, in the seclusion of your own kind, conceived dreams of Utopian madness and you came forth and cast your foolish fancies like a net upon the ignorant. And now you find your failings; you see the petty smallness of your ideals and you retreat—back into your abbey like a frightened crab creeping beneath the ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor

... "of little use," said the school committee that had them in charge. The people wouldn't go there. So, then, let them be given up. And a school commissioner with whom I argued the case on the way home responded indulgently that some of my notions "were regarded as Utopian," however ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis

... 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 already classic ground, for ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns

... the Society were in the main on things abstract or Utopian. Social Reconstruction was a constant theme, Hubert Bland outlined "Revolutionary Prospects" in January, 1885, and Bernard Shaw in February combated "The proposed Abolition ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease

... 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 ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... workmen themselves, more inclined to Saxon individualism and revolutionary co-operation than to his socialism, in which he saw salvation, and which they regarded as pedantic and hybrid. Bismarck's system had no justification and derogated all laws of ethics and justice. With his Utopian schemes the professors in their lecture-rooms endeavored to excite the Socialists, who, if they had listened and demanded their realization would have been exposed to be shot down in the streets by the soldiery, without anyone being able even to raise a protest against ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various

... you like to undertake a wild goose chase of this sort it is your business, and not mine; but I consider the idea is the most Utopian that I ever heard of. As to where the tent stood, is it likely that a man would remember to within a hundred yards where a tent stood fourteen years ago? Why, you might dig up acres and acres of ground and not be sure then that you had hit upon ...
— Colonel Thorndyke's Secret • G. A. Henty

... romance, entitled Arcadia (published in 1590). Unlike Lyly, Sidney did not aim at precision, emphatic contrast, and balance. For its effectiveness, the Arcadia relies on poetic language and conceptions. The characters in the romance live and love in a Utopian Arcadia, where "the morning did strow Roses and Violets in the heavenly floor against the coming of the Sun," and where the shepherd boy pipes "as though he should ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck

... him at home when it is,' said Caffyn; 'these things generally find the culprits "out" in more senses than one, to use an old Joe Miller. He would look extremely well in the Old Bailey dock. But this is Utopian, Uncle.' ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey

... all. The desire to resuscitate the past is the most unfruitful and dangerous of Utopian dreams, and the art of good living does not consist in retiring from life. But we are trying to throw light upon one of the errors that drag most heavily upon human progress, in order to find a remedy for it—namely, ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner

... attempt a repeal of the union would be chimerical. I pity the man who requires an argument in support of the position that Ireland wants her parliament; and that individual who pronounces the attainment of such a consummation to be Utopian, is reminded of the Catholic question. Look at the Catholic cause. Do I not remember when it was difficult to procure a meeting of five Catholics to look for a restoration of our then withheld rights? I recollect when we agitators were almost as much execrated ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... yet upon the dial of your life Her sun mark out the short sweet hours of joy, And all too swiftly on the shadows glide— If yet you prize the loving heart you hold, From this most mad delusion waken up, That blindly blights her whom it seeks to bless; Cease your Utopian and unsafe essays, And rather turn your studious care to call The fading roses back into her cheeks, And shed health's gladness on her feeble frame; Reflect whilst yet you may, lest late Remorse Stalk, ghost-like, ...
— Poems • Walter R. Cassels

... counselor, a man of practice and of facts, uncontrolled by theories and wise in ancestral experience, replied: "We must not listen to this dreamer, this theorist, this innovator, this utopian, this political economist, this friend to Stulta. We would be entirely ruined if the embarrassments of the road were not carefully weighed and exactly equalized, between Stulta and Peura. There ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat

... value, when all the work of the house which cannot be done by machinery is that of handling beautiful things and has a meaning in the life of the individual and the family, service will not be required in the vast majority of homes: then we may approach to the Utopian ideal of ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards

... 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 lords of ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane

... to plant them on ten-acre farms up there under the shadow of old Mt. Kearsarge, and convert them into Pagans. I'm going to create an Eden out of an abandoned Hell. I'm going to lay out a townsite and men will build me a town, so I can light it with my own electricity. It's a big Utopian dream, Donna dear, but what a crowning glory to the dreamer's life if it only comes true! Just think, Donna. A few thousand of the poor and lowly and hopeless brought out of the cities and given land and a chance for life, liberty and the ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne

... of haphazard, but it is not so careless as it seems. I believe it to be—even now that I am through with the book—the best way to a sort of lucid vagueness which has always been my intention in this matter. I tried over several beginnings of a Utopian book before I adopted this. I rejected from the outset the form of the argumentative essay, the form which appeals most readily to what is called the "serious" reader, the reader who is often no more than the solemnly impatient parasite of great questions. He likes everything ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells

... are seldom read, and may be passed over lightly. We mention only, as indicative of his wide range, his History of Henry VII, his Utopian romance The New Atlantis, his Advancement of Learning and his Novum Organum. The last two works, one in English, the other in Latin, were parts of the Instauratio Magna, or The Great Institution of True Philosophy, a colossal work which Bacon ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long

... parents, had clung to old-fashioned methods, and had been very difficult to move in the matter of modern innovations. She had always put on the curb when the second mistress's fertile imagination had pranced away on Utopian lines. To an ardent spirit, steeped in new race-ideals, and longing for an opportunity of serving her generation, it was a proud moment when she suddenly found herself in a position to carry out her pet schemes unchecked. On this first ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil

... To-day such a work as Le Haras Humain ("The Human Stud-farm") of Dr. Binet-Sangle, putting forward proposals which, whether beneficial or not, will certainly find no one to carry them out, similarly furnishes an excuse to those who would reject eugenics altogether. Utopian schemes have their value; we should be able to find inspiration in the most modern of them, just as we still do in Plato's immortal Republic. But in this, as in other matters, we must exercise a little intelligence. We must not confuse the brilliant excursion of ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis

... history of animals. Surely it is not too much to say that this close friendship between the natural philosopher and the soldier has changed the whole course of civilisation to this very day. Do not consider me Utopian when I tell you, that I should like to see the study of physical science an integral part of the curriculum of every military school. I would train the mind of the lad who was to become hereafter an officer ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley

... evil-minded agitators who, for their own wicked purposes, induce men to prefer a guinea to a pound of wages. But, after all, there is something in the demand for fair play and for the means of leading decent lives, which requires a better answer. It is easy, again, to say that all Socialists are Utopian. Make every man equal to-day, and the old inequalities will reappear to-morrow. Pitch such a one over London Bridge, it was said, with nothing on but his breeches, and he will turn up at Woolwich with his pockets full of gold. It is as idle to try ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen

... fools by teaching them to overrate their abilities. Those who walk in the vale of humility amid the modest flowers of virtue and favoured with the presence of the Holy One, he would lift into the Utopian heights of vanity and pride, that they might fall into the condemnation of the Devil. He gathers all good opinions and approving sentiments that he might carry them to his prey, losing nothing in weight ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate

... height she has held. It is hinted at in the Bhagavad-Gita:—"whatsoever is practised by the most excellent men"; again, it is the Aryan doctrine of the Guruparampara Chain. The whole idea is so remote from modern practice and theory that it must seem to the west utopian, even absurd; but we have Asoka's reign in India, and Confucius's Ministry in Lu, to prove its basic truth. During that Ministry he had flashed the picture of such a ruler on to the screen of time: and it was enough. ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... MR. MALLESON,—The gentle words in your last letter referring to the difference between yourself and me in the degree of hope with which you could regard what could not but appear to the general mind Utopian in designs for the action of the Christian Church, surely might best be answered by appeal to the consistent tone of the ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... and morbid violence, of policy and recklessness. He was educated up 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

... shrewd fellow, but neither he nor Trotsky can cope with the situation much longer. Only last week I telegraphed Mr. Lloyd George that England must act at once if we are to save Bolshevism from being nothing better than a Utopian dream. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 30, 1919 • Various

... never; 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 of safety, I must discharge engineer sympathy, and whistle down the brakes. ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... an old story, of course, to Peter, who had the easy-chair beside me, and so it was to Morris, who had helped Miss Felicia carry out so Utopian a scheme, but it had come to me as a complete surprise, and I was still ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith

... prosperous, whose institutions had been shaped and whose political temper had been inspired by one great lawgiver, contributed even more powerfully than what he had picked up about Lycurgus and Lacedaemon, to give him a turn for Utopian speculation, and a conviction of the artificiality and easy modifiableness of the social structure. This, however, is less certain than that he unconsciously received impressions in his youth from the circumstances of Geneva, both as ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... appear to many consciences just and sacred. Slavery, protection, and monopoly find defenders, not only in those who profit by them, but in those who suffer by them. If you suggest a doubt as to the morality of these institutions, it is said directly—"You are a dangerous innovator, a utopian, a theorist, a despiser of the laws; you would shake the ...
— Essays on Political Economy • Frederic Bastiat

... to sit on the fields of her battles, to wander on the romantic banks of her rivers, and to muse by the stately towers or venerable ruins, once the honoured abodes of her heroes.' But that was a Utopian dream; he had dallied long enough with life, and now it was time he should be in earnest. 'I have a fond, an aged mother to care for; and some other bosom ties perhaps ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun

... you are not wrong," murmured Crisostomo in a low voice, "when you say that justice should seek to do good by rewarding virtue and educating the criminals. Only, it's impossible, Utopian! And where could be secured so much ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal

... 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 hear what new light had broken in upon his old friend, was ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt

... of "The Tyranny of God," consists of two hundred and fifty copies, printed on Utopian paper, bound in limp leather, gilt top, stamped in gold. Each copy is autographed ...
— Tyranny of God • Joseph Lewis

... 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 trying to ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... child," he said; "you still believe in the possibility of realizing Utopian dreams, and your faith is so honest, so manly! You want to force a scourge upon a timid young king, who most ardently desires to maintain peace, and to remain unnoticed, and tell him, 'With this scourge drive out ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach

... eloquently from the tribune. He was a constitutional "Mugwump": he cared for neither parties nor men, but for ideas. He was equally opposed to the domination of arbitrary power and to the tyranny of Socialism. He voted with the right against the left on extravagant Utopian schemes, and with the left against the right when he felt that the legitimate complaints of the poor and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner

... species. No sane mind in a sane body resolves upon a real crime. It is a man of violent passions, bloodshot eyes, and swollen veins, that alone can grasp the knife of murder. The system of a simple diet promises no Utopian advantages. It is no mere reform of legislation, whilst the furious passions and evil propensities of the human heart, in which it had its origin, are still unassuaged. It strikes at the root of all evil, and is an experiment which may be tried ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... in fury Against their boastful friend, For prehistoric patience Cometh quickly to an end. Said one, "This is chimerical! Utopian! Absurd!" Said another, "What a stupid life! Too dull, upon my word!" Cried all, "Before such things can come, You idiotic child, You must alter Human Nature!" And they all sat back and smiled. Thought they, "An answer to that last It will be hard ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various

... and the time when it again experiences the desire for rebirth. But from this realm inventors bring down their original ideas; there the philanthropist obtains the clearest vision of how to realize his utopian dreams and the spiritual aspirations of the saintly ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel

... middle-class citizens, and workmen infested with middle-class ideas admire their own rhetoric in the "Talking Shops," and "practical people" are engaged in endless discussions on forms of government, we, the "Utopian dreamers"—we shall have to consider the question of ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin

... modern Utopian friends look at each other rather doubtfully, for their ultimate hope is the dissolution of all special ties. But again I seem to hear, like a kind of echo, an answer from beyond the world. "You will have real obligations, and therefore real adventures when you ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton

... he is pure humbug. I haven't a doubt, as I told you, that he believes, sufficiently at least for election purposes, in the fallacies that he advocates, even in the old age pension, the minimum, or more accurately, the maximum wage, and of course in what doesn't sound so Utopian since we have experimented with it, that favourite dogma of the near-Socialists, the Government ownership of railroads. His main theory, however, appears to be some far-fetched abstraction which he calls the humanizing of industry—you've heard that before! Mere bombast, ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow

... History will brand these men with shame for all time. I'll fix 'em! I'll go back to Washington, and if the government has any backbone, if it's still American, they'll go to work or fight! (Pointedly.) This is what comes of your Utopian dreams, of your socialism! ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... man, sword in hand; and this sublime and imposing spectacle would cause Napoleon to retreat with his host beyond the Rhine, the German Rhine, whose banks would be guarded by the united people of Germany." "You speak like a Utopian, my dear count," said the emperor, with a shrug. "If the united people of Germany are alone able to defeat and expel Bonaparte, he will never he defeated and expelled, for Germany will never be united; she will never stand up as one man, but always resemble a number of rats grown together by ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach

... 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 not ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... nature of man. It will recognize as the first test of all political systems and moral codes whether or not they are "against human nature." It will insist that they be cut to fit the whole man, not merely a part of him. For there are utopian proposals made every day which cover about as much of a human being ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann

... call forth the tenderest feelings of a woman's heart and cherish them yourself as long as you need them, as long as your children require a nurse to love them, and then to blight and thwart and destroy them, whenever your own use for them is at an end. This may be Utopian; but it is always a little thing if one mother or two mothers can be brought to feel more tenderly to those who share their toil and have no ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson

... drag herself down to the low filth of politics. Leave out the ballot, and woman's rights is like a pyramid without the apex, or, better still, like building a temple without the corner stone. I have no Utopian notions concerning the immediate effect of woman's voting. I do not think the millennium is coming when she can vote. But if women could vote it would not be possible for those disreputable shows on Vine street, the foulest and filthiest ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... great effect on the multitudes; for the multitudes felt instinctively that they were too good to be true. That such was the case is admitted by socialistic historians themselves. Socialism during this period was, they say, in its "Utopian stage." It was not even sufficiently coherent to have acquired a distinctive name till the word "socialism" was coined in connection with the views of Owen, which suffered discredit from the failure of his attempts to put them into ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock

... 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 any of ...
— Some Cities and San Francisco and Resurgam • Hubert Howe Bancroft

... of my study and activity into the economic and industrial struggle. Here I discovered men and women fired with the glorious vision of a new world, of a proletarian world emancipated, a Utopian world,—it glowed in romantic colours for the majority of those with whom I came in closest contact. The next step, the immediate step, was another matter, less romantic and too often less encouraging. In their ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger

... enumerated here but the men derisively described by Karl Marx as the "Utopian Socialists" of the nineteenth century? Utopian Socialism is thus simply the open and visible expression of Grand Orient Freemasonry. Moreover, these Utopian Socialists were almost without exception Freemasons or ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster

... membership cards read, "All men are brothers." Karl Schapper, Heinrich Bauer, and Joseph Moll, all workingmen, were among those who made an imposing impression upon Engels. Even more notable was Weitling, a tailor, who traveled all over Germany preaching a mixture of Christian communism and French utopian socialism. He was a simple-hearted missionary, delivering his evangel. "The World As It Is and As It Might Be" was the moving title of one of his books that attracted to him not only many followers among the workers, ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter

... of their 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 ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding

... in the year 1787 that the empress began her journey towards her Utopian city, to receive the homage of its citizens and to exhibit to the world the magnificence of her reign. Great projects were in the air. Poland had just been cut into fragments and distributed among the hungry kingdoms ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... responsibility of large families, and so were giving the country over to the later and usually inferior immigrant and his progeny. I am not sure that it might not be well to cultivate a new sense of social duty in this matter. Is it Utopian to suggest a policy of "America for the Americans"—some effectual restriction of immigration before it is too late, so as to leave room for the natural increase of the American people? This is an "expansion," ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer

... 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, ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub

... 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 the ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly

... industrial system of to-day. Its triumph had not been simply a triumph over Nature, but a triumph over Nature and the fellow-man. This, I must warn you, was my theory at the time. I had no convenient cicerone in the pattern of the Utopian books. My explanation may be absolutely wrong. I still think it is the most plausible one. But even on this supposition the balanced civilization that was at last attained must have long since passed its zenith, and was ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

... vehement would not hear of concessions, since the Lutherans would then be charged with inconsistency and the Emperor would only increase his demands. (C. R. 3, 292.) Evidently then, even at that time Melanchthon was not entirely cured of his utopian dream. ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente

... employees and allies, one's friends and agents, to repel the dishonest and rebuke the impudent, dealing with those whom one chooses to deal with, where personal choice can fairly be exercised; but such a privilege is Utopian in business, even among men of fortune, and envied Ritchie has little more freedom than humble Jones. Besides, the pursuit of startling success, though it often ruins possibilities of contentment, rarely ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various

... 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 produce ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... "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 can find ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald

... 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, and life, driven into ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes

... a violent disruption of great material interests that now are wedded together. The dream of separate State sovereignty, our great Union split into two or more confederacies, prosperous and peaceable, is Utopian. So far from the secession doctrine carried out leading to peace and prosperity, it can only lead to perpetual war and adversity. The request to be 'let alone,' is simply a request that the nation should consent to see the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various

... principal subject of this evening, I wish to anticipate one or two objections which may arise in your minds to what I must lay before you. It may perhaps have been felt by you last evening, that some things I proposed to you were either romantic or Utopian. Let us think for a few moments ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin

... for the improvement of the human race in general and the American people in particular. The Friends yearly Meeting, the Conference of the American Anti-Slavery societies, the Grahamites or Vegetarians, the Temperance advocates and other upholders of beneficent, benevolent, and Utopian ideals assembled on these occasions, and with much eloquence, made it clear to the meanest understanding that the universal adoption of the principles especially professed by each would do away with all evil in the ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears

... realized the Utopian character of the scheme, saw its impracticability, and proceeded to condemn it with more than his ordinary irritability and brusquerie. Finding, however, that the emperor was not to be argued out of the idea of holding a labor conference, he proceeded to ridicule it, and what was worse, to cause ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy

... homeward, musing thoughtfully: "This is a strange world," she soliloquized. "Let philosophers air their utopian theories about its containing the elements of universal happiness. I know that human nature, as it is now constituted, is too selfish and mean to arrive at a state of absolute perfection. Truly, 'men ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock

... 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 ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey

... co-operative living. Into whatever millennial state Ruskin sought to usher his little band of English followers and disciples, one must speak appreciatively of his motives in projecting the scheme, and of the money and labor he personally lavished upon the Utopian project. Reverently also must one speak of the catholic creed to which its members were asked to subscribe: namely, to trust in God, recognize the nobleness of human nature, labor faithfully with one's might, be loyal to one's common country, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord

... Sigismund I. and II., and that of their predecessor, John Sobieski, the principles of these seminaries might be considered sound. But soon after the death of the last-named monarch, when the latent mischief contained in the Utopian idea of the perfection of an always elective monarchy began to shake the stability of even the monarchy itself, certain of the public teachers evinced correspondent signs of this destructive species of freemasonry; and about the same period the Voltaire venom of infidelity against all the laws ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter

... such suppositions as these, the southern man will perhaps say, are visionary and utopian in the highest degree. No such state of things as is contemplated by them, can by any possibility be realized with such a population as the southern slaves. Very well; say this, if you please, and ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various

... not the radical revolution which is a utopian dream for Germany, not the general human emancipation, but rather the partial, the merely political revolution, the revolution which leaves the pillars of the house standing. Upon what can a partial, a merely political revolution base itself? Upon the fact that a part of bourgeois ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx

... candidates had been nothing to brag of, and willingly would she support the right woman for President. If Victoria lived up to the high standard of the Woodhull Memorial, then even she might be that woman. After all, it was an era of radical theories and Utopian dreams, of extravagances of every ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz

... one's employees and allies, one's friends and agents, to repel the dishonest and rebuke the impudent, dealing with those whom one chooses to deal with, where personal choice can fairly be exercised; but such a privilege is Utopian in business, even among men of fortune, and envied Ritchie has little more freedom than humble Jones. Besides, the pursuit of startling success, though it often ruins possibilities of contentment, rarely creates them. Frederic Soulie, having had the misfortune to gain $16,000 in ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various

... 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 ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various

... 1509 a 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

... the near future, and was mixed with less worthy political ambitions which had a different origin. The prophet always foreshortens his revelation, and generally blends the city of God with a vision of his own country transfigured. We see him doing this even to-day, in his Utopian ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge

... 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 inoffensive ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens

... a miser might do. With it, he was free from these carking cares that were making his mind foul and muddy. If he had money! Slow, cool visions of triumphs rose before him outlined on the years to come, practical, if Utopian. Slow and sure successes of science and art, where his brain could work, helpful and growing. Far off, yet surely to come,—surely for him,—a day to come when a pure social system should be universal, should have thrust out its fibres of light knitting ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various

... the schools which had received the Greek wisdom. In course of time a period of intoxication came upon him. He imagined that he was to bring about a new church which he everywhere calls the Kingdom of God. His views were Utopian; he lived in a dream life, and his idealism elevated him above all other agitators. He founded a sect, and his disciples became intoxicated with his own dreams. But he did not sanction all their excesses: for instance, he did not believe the inexact and contradictory ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst

... interests were paramount to the great interests of the territory, which, at the critical period when the seeds of prosperity should have been planted, was fatal to our advancement. Next came the era of Utopian projects of internal improvement, by which our people were saddled with an onerous load of debt. In the mean time immigrants were misled by false reports concerning the character of the soil in the interior of the State, ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland

... "I am not an Utopian," continued young Norman. "Law and custom permit—not to say sanctify—our sort of business. So—I do my best. But I shall not conceal from you that it's distasteful to me. I wish to get out of it. I shall get out as soon as I've made enough capital to assure me the income I ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips

... barometer. Trade was brisk with 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 ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... regime and yet aloof from the worse follies of the demagogues who now rage in the country. Vastly less picturesque than Blasco Ibanez, he is nearer the normal Spaniard—the Spaniard who, in the long run, must erect a new structure of society upon the half archaic and half Utopian chaos now reigning in the peninsula. Thus his book, though it is addressed to Spaniards, should have a certain value for English-speaking readers. And ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja

... sympathy, never; 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 ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... 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 ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart

... corporation, and that is the legisiative delegation from the city. If the refuse matter were taken from that, there would be nothing left. It has been proposed that the Legislature itself should be purified; but this idea is Utopian, PUNCHINELLO fears. If Niagara were squirted through its halls, the water would be dirtied, but the halls would not be cleansed. Alas, poor city! Trampled under the heels of the aristocratic HONG and PENNY BUNN, what is ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 6, May 7, 1870 • Various

... If his Lordship's reading of the old Nelsonian motto is "England expects that every clergyman (Dissenter or Churchman) should do somebody else's duty," then England will have to wait a considerable time for the Utopian ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., October 11, 1890 • Various

... nullification has amplified itself into secession, and Northern free-soil principles have burst into this growth of abolition. Men have not calculated the results. Charming pictures are drawn for you of the negro in a state of Utopian bliss, owning his own hoe and eating his own hog; in a paradise, where everything is bought and sold, except his wife, his little ones, and himself. But the enfranchised negro has always thrown away his hoe, has eaten any man's ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope

... million slaves to a population of sixteen millions. Then, again, the duration of the republics of antiquity, compared with that of monarchies, was very short. Republics are very easy to found, and very difficult to maintain, while with monarchies it is exactly the reverse. If it is Utopian schemes that are wanted, I say this: the only solution of the problem would be a despotism of the wise and the noble, of the true aristocracy and the genuine nobility, brought about by the method of generation—that is, by the marriage of the noblest ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer

... work, 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

... thinking of hanging,' says Captain Macheath. Of all people the most tormenting are those who bid you hope in the midst of despair, who, by never caring about anything but their own sanguine, hair-brained Utopian schemes, have at no time any particular cause for embarrassment and despondency because they have never the least chance of success, and who by including whatever does not hit their idle fancy, kings, priests, ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt

... devoted attachment 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

... surprised and disappointed, therefore, at finding that on this subject I was often indulging in an Utopian dream, rather than a well-founded opinion. I have been concerned at finding that these fine estates were too often involved, and mortgaged, or placed in the hands of creditors, and the owners exiled from their paternal ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving

... encourages and to which it renders man more liable. In the consideration of these cases it must not be forgotten that the sexual relations are much more to man or woman than is generally acknowledged. The days for the establishment of the Utopian republic of Plato are not yet with us. That Platonic love does exist is true, as it has in the past and will in the future. Scipio, refusing to accept the beautiful betrothed bride of an enemy as a present, or ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino

... disruption of great material interests that now are wedded together. The dream of separate State sovereignty, our great Union split into two or more confederacies, prosperous and peaceable, is Utopian. So far from the secession doctrine carried out leading to peace and prosperity, it can only lead to perpetual war and adversity. The request to be 'let alone,' is simply a request that the nation should consent to see the Constitution and Union overthrown, slavery triumphant, and the great ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various

... matters also have been precipitated, some crystals of poetry translucent, symmetrical, enduring. The immediate practical outcome was disappointing, and the external history of the agitation is a record of failed experiments, spurious sciences, Utopian philosophies, and sects founded only to dwindle away or be reabsorbed into some form of {439} orthodoxy. In the eyes of the conservative, or the worldly-minded, or of the plain people who could not understand the enigmatic utterances ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... embarrass the Government of the United States in the august and solemn championship of human liberty committed to its charge. And let it be remarked that our expectations of English approval were never Utopian. The great principle involved in the American contest was so far above the level of the ordinary pursuits of men, that, even among ourselves, few have been able to transfuse it into their daily consciousness. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various

... walked slowly homeward, musing thoughtfully: "This is a strange world," she soliloquized. "Let philosophers air their utopian theories about its containing the elements of universal happiness. I know that human nature, as it is now constituted, is too selfish and mean to arrive at a state of absolute perfection. Truly, 'men are a little breed.' 'But, in the future, when that which is ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock

... must be taken at once," insisted Gorham. "I told you, gentlemen, that I had awakened from my Utopian dream. I shall make no more promises until I am absolutely certain that they will be made good ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt

... reduce the freedom of the individual to a smaller measure? Whatever social tyranny may have existed twenty years ago, when it wrung that fiery protest from the lips of John Stuart Mill, can we imagine a state of society, not totally Utopian, in which the individual man need be less ashamed of his social fetters, in which he could more freely utter all his honest convictions, more boldly propound all his theories, more fearlessly agitate for their speedy ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller

... my man, Cheetham, the Merchant Service boatswain, and could not quite make out how "Alf," as the sailors called him, got so much out of the hands—this little squeaky-voiced man—I think we hit on Utopian conditions for working the ship. There were no wasters, and our seamen were the pick of the British Navy and Mercantile Marine. Most of the Naval men were intelligent petty officers and were as fully alive as the merchantmen ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans

... 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

... Peace lured the Powers to her House at the Hague With promises specious and welcome though vague Of a time when the terrors of war should lie hid And the leopard fall headlong in love with the kid, She drew up a set of Utopian rules For the guidance of all ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 19, 1916 • Various

... practicability of solving the problem, I do not wish to magnify its dimensions. In this and in subsequent chapters I hope to convince those who read them that there is no overstraining in the representation of the facts, and nothing Utopian in the presentation of remedies. I appeal neither to hysterical emotionalists nor headlong enthusiasts; but having tried to approach the examination of this question in a spirit of scientific investigation, I put forth my proposals with the view of securing the support and co-operation ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth

... sunset. There were at least fifty kinds of perpetual motion, one of which was applicable to the wits of newspaper editors and writers of every description. Professor Espy was here, with a tremendous storm in a gum-elastic bag. I could enumerate many more of these Utopian inventions; but, after all, a more imaginative collection is to be found in the Patent ...
— The Hall of Fantasy (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... colors the imaginations of Socialists have beautifully pictured their utopian state for the benefit of the credulous and oppressed. Unfortunately, however, for the followers of Karl Marx, a little reasoning and common sense show that their visionary state, instead of being a heavenly paradise, would in reality be a descent ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto

... a strange thing in civilization, and a stranger when we consider what literature does for us, blessing our world or banning it—it is a wonder and a shame that books of whatever tendency are so cast forth upon the waters to sink or swim at hazard. I acknowledge, friend, your present muttering, Utopian! Arcadian! Formosan! to be not ill-founded: the sketch is a hasty one; but though it may have somewhat in common with the vagaries of Sir Thomas More, Sir Philip Sidney, and that king in impudence, George Psalmanazar, still I stand upon this ground, that many ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... mention among other things in this play, that Shakespeare has anticipated nearly all the arguments on the Utopian schemes of ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt

... Utopian. I much fear it will never be made a blessed reality by either philosophy or religion. We have had both for forty centuries, yet the fool has become ever more offensive and the liar has overrun the land. Yet we imagine that because we no longer live in caves and ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... "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 ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell

... that," his son replied carelessly. "I don't remember Uncle Phil much. Jeff's a queer fellow, full of Utopian notions about brotherhood and that sort of thing. But he's practical in a way. He gets things done in spite of ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine

... AUSTIN wanted to exclude lawyers, along with roving frontiersmen, from his colonies in Texas, and hoped thus to promote a utopian society. The lawyers got in, however. Their wit, the anecdotes of which they were both subject and author, and the political stories they made traditional from the stump, have not been adequately set down. As criminal lawyers they stood as high in society as corporation ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie

... Mr. Fowler, the Oxford Professor of Logic, which treat of the department of Fallacies. Perhaps Bentham's Book of Fallacies is too political for me to commend it to you here. But if there happens to be any one in Birmingham who is fond of meeting proposed changes by saying that they are Utopian; that they are good in theory, but bad in practice; that they are too good to be realised, and so forth, then I can promise him that he will in that book hear of something very much ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 1: On Popular Culture • John Morley

... so "magnificent"! Alexander spoke with the eloquence of a possessing passion, and Ian listened and felt himself to be the sympathizing friend. Even the profound, unreasonable, unhumorous idealism of old Steadfast had its quaint, Utopian appeal. He was going to marry the farmer's granddaughter, though he might, undoubtedly, marry better.... Ian listened, ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston

... The Socialists and other utopian critics, who are supposed to drill to the bedrock of questions, have looked upon advertising as essentially a parasite upon the production and distribution of wealth. They tell us that in the good time ...
— Commercialism and Journalism • Hamilton Holt

... said Harman, "set the wolves to form protective enactments for the sheep. I fear, my good sir, that such a scheme is much too Utopian for any practically beneficial purpose. In the meantime, if it can be done, let it. No legislation, however, will be able, in my mind, to bind so powerful a class as the landlords of Ireland are, unless a strong and sturdy public opinion is created ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton

... preparation we had constantly to revise downward our standards. We lived without comforts which formerly we had regarded as absolutely essential. We lived a life so crude and rough that our army experiences in England seemed Utopian by comparison. But we throve splendidly. A government, paternalistic in its solicitude for our welfare, had schooled our bodies to withstand hardships and to endure privations. In England we had been inoculated and vaccinated whether we ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall

... this is 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 ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... unmindful of the fact that the views here expressed, may sound rather Utopian. But in this age of rush and bustle for place, preferment and national gain, by individuals and the nation; and in an age when anarchists, lynchers and murderers set at defiance all law and government; in an age when, in certain sections of the country, the ballot-box ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various

... the particular methods which Swift suggested for realizing his reformatory scheme, and they were, no doubt, artificial and wooden enough; the tract itself remains an excellent survey of the evils and gross habits of the time. The methods may be Utopian (Swift himself thought they were open to discussion), but the spirit of sincerity and piety is unmistakable. It is worth remembering, however, that several of the proposals, such as those for closing the public-houses at twelve o'clock at night; the ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift

... consolidates the faith of those who adopt it. According to this faith, the socialists do not have to create socialism, they only have to cooeperate in the historical process which will inevitably make socialism grow. In thus recognizing the supremity of the law of history, socialism, utopian up to this time, becomes scientific and, under its new form, it is no longer subject to the influence of personal opinions, no matter how full of genius they may be. But this "scientific socialism," which, on account of the backwardness of political economy, could be only a step ahead, was taken ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky

... 'Looking Backward,' that distinguish it from the generality of Utopian literature, lie in its definite scheme of industrial organization on a national basis, and the equal share allotted to all persons in the products of industry, or the public income, on the same ground that men share ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy

... 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 ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild

... 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 ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton

... of this work the author shows not only the reactionary character of anarchism, but he exposes its class bias and its empty philosophic idealism and utopian program. He shows anarchism to be just the opposite of scientific socialism or communism. It aims at a society dominated by individualism, which is simply a capitalist ideal. Such ideals as "liberty," "equality," "fraternity," first sprang from ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff

... logical conclusion the industrial system of to-day. Its triumph had not been simply a triumph over Nature, but a triumph over Nature and the fellow-man. This, I must warn you, was my theory at the time. I had no convenient cicerone in the pattern of the Utopian books. My explanation may be absolutely wrong. I still think it is the most plausible one. But even on this supposition the balanced civilization that was at last attained must have long since passed ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

... 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 of you. You will notice ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard

... and it is, therefore, a matter of importance that they should think aright. It is of importance, that they should be guarded against fallacious Utopian promises. Henceforth, there is no security for the stability of the world but in the contentment of minds. There is no rest for mankind, unless men will understand the conditions of their ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher

... was sent out of the ark. If there was rest for the soles of their feet, it was all that could be said. There was no promise of a place to sit down; and as for lying down and getting their natural rest, the idea was Utopian. ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner

... in this 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various

... thirteenth centuries, says Meray in a charming book on life in the days of the Courts of Love, we find women "with infinite skill and an adorable refinement seizing the moral direction of French society." They did so, he remarks, in a spirit so Utopian, so ideally poetic, that historians have hesitated to take them seriously. The laws of the Courts of Love[77] may sometimes seem to us immoral and licentious, but in reality they served to restrain the worst immoralities ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... philanthropic thinkers enumerated here but the men derisively described by Karl Marx as the "Utopian Socialists" of the nineteenth century? Utopian Socialism is thus simply the open and visible expression of Grand Orient Freemasonry. Moreover, these Utopian Socialists were almost without exception Freemasons or ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster

... of practice and of facts, uncontrolled by principles and wise in ancestral experience, replied: "We must not listen to this dreamer, this theorist, this innovator, this Utopian, this political economist, this friend to N*w Y*rk. We would be entirely ruined if the embarrassments of the road were not carefully weighed and exactly equalized between N*w Y*rk and M*ntr**l. There would be more difficulty in going than in ...
— What Is Free Trade? - An Adaptation of Frederic Bastiat's "Sophismes Econimiques" - Designed for the American Reader • Frederic Bastiat

... 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 in one. Curates and ushers are generally unmarried. ...
— Dr. Wortle's School • Anthony Trollope

... taught it were, consequently, nearly all Greeks. Cicero had made it fashionable among many of his countrymen; and although the Latin mind, always practical to the verge of utilitarianism, was not congenial to utopian speculations, still, as it was the fashion, all intellectual men felt the need of becoming sufficiently acquainted with it to be able to speak of it and even to embrace some particular school. Those patricians, ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud

... moves it to commit 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, but ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... could succeed in taming the selfishness of self. But he told himself now that the struggle to do so had hitherto been vain. There had been but the one thing which had ever been to him supremely desirable. He had gone through the years of his early life forming some Utopian ideas,—dreaming of some perfection in politics, in philanthropy, in social reform, and the like,—something by devoting himself to which he could make his life a joy to himself. Then this girl had come across ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope

... attachment to the ancient order of things, had viewed with satisfaction the substitution of the Consular for the Directorial government, and entertained no personal dislike to the First Consul. Among the Chateaux, more than anywhere else, it had always been the custom to cherish Utopian ideas respecting the management of public affairs, and to criticise the acts of the Government. It is well known that at this time there was not in all France a single old mansion surmounted by its two weathercocks ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... literally taken from Essay I. 30, 'On Cannibals.' We shall later on show Shakspere's reason for giving us this fanciful description of such an Utopian commonwealth. ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis

... times," returned Erasmus. "Methinks yonder phantom, be he skeleton or angel, will have snatched both of us away ere we behold the full issue either of thy preachings, or my Greek Testament, or of our More's Utopian images. Dost thou not feel as though we were like children who have set some mighty engine in motion, like the great water-wheels in my native home, which, whirled by the flowing streams of time and opinion, may break ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... Sunday amusement," interrupted Lady Angleby sarcastically. "You are too Utopian, Sir Edward. Your colony will be a dismal failure and disappointment if you conduct it on ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr

... the scarlet-fever story was probably an extemporaneous work of fiction, got up to gratify the Hibernian anger at Ann, and that it wasn't in the least worth while to believe one thing more than another from the fact that any of the tribe said it. But she refuses to be comforted, and is so Utopian as to lie there, crying,—'Oh, if I only could get one that I could trust,—one that really would speak the truth to me,—one that I might know really went where she said she went, and really did as she said she did!' ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various

... refused to acknowledge a Supreme Providence, and substituted some airy abstraction of "Universal Love" in its place. An aristocrat by birth and, as I understand, also in appearance and manners, he was yet a leveller in politics, and to such an Utopian extent as to be, seriously, the advocate of a community of property. With a delicacy and even romance of sentiment, which lends such grace to some of his lesser poems, he could notwithstanding contemplate a change in the relations of the sexes, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore

... in the Society were in the main on things abstract or Utopian. Social Reconstruction was a constant theme, Hubert Bland outlined "Revolutionary Prospects" in January, 1885, and Bernard Shaw in February combated "The ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease

... connection, and the multitude would all be on the same side. The favorite had professed to hold in abhorrence those means by which preceding ministers had kept the House of Commons in good humor. He now began to think that he had been too scrupulous. His Utopian visions were at an end. It was necessary, not only to bribe, but to bribe more shamelessly and flagitiously than his predecessors, in order to make up for lost time. A majority must be secured, no matter ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... had, for the present, to content myself with the moral satisfaction of my successes, of which my unmistakable popularity with the Dresden public, and the respect and attention paid to me, formed part. But even in this respect my Utopian dreams were destined to be disturbed. I think that my appearance at Dresden marked the beginning of a new era in journalism and criticism, which found food for its hitherto but slightly developed vitality in its vexation at my success. The two ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner

... fashioning forms of co-operative living. Into whatever millennial state Ruskin sought to usher his little band of English followers and disciples, one must speak appreciatively of his motives in projecting the scheme, and of the money and labor he personally lavished upon the Utopian project. Reverently also must one speak of the catholic creed to which its members were asked to subscribe: namely, to trust in God, recognize the nobleness of human nature, labor faithfully with one's might, be loyal to one's common country, its laws, and its monarch's ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord

... Bacon are seldom read, and may be passed over lightly. We mention only, as indicative of his wide range, his History of Henry VII, his Utopian romance The New Atlantis, his Advancement of Learning and his Novum Organum. The last two works, one in English, the other in Latin, were parts of the Instauratio Magna, or The Great Institution of True Philosophy, a colossal work which Bacon did not finish, which ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long

... O hours Utopian which we may anticipate! Thick London fog how easy 'tis to dissipate, And make the most pea-soupy day as clear As ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various

... defects, it is an undeniable historical fact that these are the principles which have been wrought out and applied in the administration of the British Empire during the nineteenth century. They are not vague and Utopian dreams; they are a matter of daily practice. If they can be applied by one of the world-states, and that the greatest, why should they not be applied by the rest? But if these principles became universal, is it not apparent that all danger of a catastrophic war ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir

... necessarily be downright unscrupulous, but if he wishes to profit he must not be overburdened with niceties in the point of honour. That is where Richard Melvyn fell through. He was crippled with too many Utopian ideas of honesty, and was too soft ever to come off anything but second-best in a deal. He might as well have attempted to make his fortune by scraping a fiddle up and down Auburn Street, Goulburn. His dealing career was ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin

... the work in hand without wasting time or energy on unnecessary aches and pains; people whose bodies are kept up to the top notch of vitality by well-digested food, well-slept sleep, well-forgotten fatigue, and well-used reserve energy. That such a state of affairs is no Utopian dream, but is merely a matter of knowing how, will appear more clearly ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury

... III. with his cackling was certainly not efficacious in restraining such a flight. But it is gratifying to see how this new people, when they had it in their power to change all their laws, to throw themselves upon any Utopian theory that the folly of a wild philanthropy could devise, to discard as abominable every vestige of English rule and English power,—it is gratifying to see that, when they could have done all this, they did not do ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope

... Fairy land, and Fairies of Spenser, have no connection with popular superstition, being only words used to denote an Utopian scene of action, and imaginary or allegorical characters; and the title of the "Fairy Queen" being probably suggested by the elfin mistress of Chaucer's Sir Thopas. The stealing of the Red Cross Knight, while a child, is the only incident in the poem which approaches ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott

... follows from the foregoing discussion, is that the method of Nature is fundamental to the method of Logic. Physics should precede metaphysics, but not exclude it; both are essential to every true science, and physics, which stops with physics, leads man by dazzling promises into some Utopian desert only to leave him there to die of hunger. And it is no less true that metaphysics, without this basis in experimental science, is illusory and untrustworthy, wherever the original data ...
— The Philosophy of Evolution - and The Metaphysical Basis of Science • Stephen H. Carpenter

... what he was doing 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 what solutions his ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton

... that Shelley was in no sense an inflammatory demagogue; however visionary may have been the hopes he indulged, he based those hopes upon the still more Utopian foundation of a sudden ethical reform, and preached a revolution without bloodshed. We find in them, moreover, the germs of "The Revolt of Islam", where the hero plays the part successfully in fiction, ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds

... earlier in the nineteenth century, Robert Owen had preached a Socialist crusade with strenuous persuasion—but, ignoring politics, he outlived the temporary success of his cause. The utopian Socialism of Owen flourished and died, as Chartism, under different ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton

... 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 not dare ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... participant's paying an annual tax equal to the wages of three days' work, and eligibility as an electeur, on the possession of an income equal in value to the wages paid for two hundred days' day-labor. Owen endeavored to base the value of the paper money in circulation in his Utopian commonwealth, not on any metal of a certain weight or stamp, but on hours of labor as the unit. (Reybaud, ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher

... decision and independence in her manner which he had learned to respect. He took the letters, and in silence read them with her. They were old college letters, so filled with boyish dreams, ambitions, aspirations, and utopian theories, that I fear neither of these young people even recognized their parents in the dead ashes of the past. They were both grave, until Alice uttered a little hysterical cry, and dropped her face in her hands. Joe was instantly ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... despotism. In the North, Puritanism molded it, and went so far as to leave out the natural conservative element of all democracies—domestic slavery. As a result, we have presented now social, religious, and domestic anarchy. From Millerism, and Spiritualism, every Utopian idea has numerous advocates. The manufacturer is an aristocrat, while the working-man is a serf. The latter class, constantly goaded by poverty, seek a change—they care not what it may be. Democracy unrestrained by domestic slavery, multiplies the laboring classes indefinitely, but it debases ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... the sons it seems made trouble, also, in an attempt to usurp his father's place and take charge of affairs, as "next friend." One generation is about the limit of a Utopian Community. When those who have organized the community weaken and one by one pass away, and the young assume authority, the old ideas of austerity are forgotten and dissipation and disintegration enter. So do we move ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard

... territory nearly equal in area to the whole of Europe, carried on by a republican government elected by universal suffrage, and guaranteeing to every tiniest village its full meed of local independence,—the very idea of all this would have been scouted as a thoroughly impracticable Utopian dream. And such scepticism would have been quite justifiable, for European history did not seem to afford any precedents upon which such a forecast of the future could be logically based. Between the ...
— American Political Ideas Viewed From The Standpoint Of Universal History • John Fiske

... critics, M. Caro, a member of the Academy, who deals somewhat austerely with her religiose enthusiasms and with her Utopian projects for social reformation, remarks gravely and ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert

... roast beef, pulpit cushions, bright eyes, and small black sarsnet shoes. Suddenly the chapel bell dissolves the fleeting fabric of the vision; and, behold! the white veil is a poet's imagination, the church spire is still at a miserable distance, the vicarage is a Utopian nonentity, and the fat incumbent, in a state of the ruddiest health, is the only reality of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 350, January 3, 1829 • Various

... 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. In October he established ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger

... and intimacy with strange people and strange 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 ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland

... co-operation than to his socialism, in which he saw salvation, and which they regarded as pedantic and hybrid. Bismarck's system had no justification and derogated all laws of ethics and justice. With his Utopian schemes the professors in their lecture-rooms endeavored to excite the Socialists, who, if they had listened and demanded their realization would have been exposed to be shot down in the streets by the soldiery, without anyone being able even to raise a protest ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various

... sister, the Countess of Pembroke, a pastoral romance, entitled Arcadia (published in 1590). Unlike Lyly, Sidney did not aim at precision, emphatic contrast, and balance. For its effectiveness, the Arcadia relies on poetic language and conceptions. The characters in the romance live and love in a Utopian Arcadia, where "the morning did strow Roses and Violets in the heavenly floor against the coming of the Sun," and where the shepherd boy pipes "as though ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck

... 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 ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... product of the exceptional but of the general—of the normality of their place, and time, and race. The ferocity and imbecility of an autocratic rule rejecting all legality and in fact basing itself upon complete moral anarchism provokes the no less imbecile and atrocious answer of a purely Utopian revolutionism encompassing destruction by the first means to hand, in the strange conviction that a fundamental change of hearts must follow the downfall of any given human institutions. These people are unable to see that all they can effect is merely ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad

... recklessness. He was educated up 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 by a well-known artist. He was of the race of leaders, and, ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland

... 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, ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer

... 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

... militia law, and an unpaid cash account bulky enough to take Cuba! Country publishers suffer in this way intensely. About one half of the "subscribers" to the Clarion of Freedom, or the Universal Democrat, or the Whig Shot Tower, seem to labor under the Utopian notion that printers were made to mourn over unpaid subscription lists; or that they "got up" papers for their own peculiar amusement, and carried them or sent them to the doors of the public for mere pastime! ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley

... doctor musingly. "The idea is Utopian, but I have often thought how pleasant life would be were there no ...
— The Bag of Diamonds • George Manville Fenn

... present, I am 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 ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo

... of his day. If it should be objected to by some of the most highly developed Negro thought of the present day, the increasing tendency towards retaliation should be attributed partly to the American Negro's metamorphosis since the colossal struggle for that Utopian ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various

... the day and had taken a keen interest in this momentous question, this dream of a regenerated mankind. He had read Karl Marx and other socialistic writers, and while his essentially practical mind could hardly approve all their programme for reorganizing the State, some of which seemed to him utopian, extravagant and even undesirable, he realised that the socialistic movement was growing rapidly all over the world and the day was not far distant when in America, as to-day in Germany and France, it would be a formidable factor to ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein

... is too familiar with the realities of life not to be aware that the search for such an ideal is a Utopian dream. ...
— Poise: How to Attain It • D. Starke

... briefly set forth in the preceding pages is not what Kant calls a "Hirngespinnst," a cobweb [235] spun in the brain of a Utopian philosopher. More or less of it has taken bodily shape in many parts of the country, and there are towns of no great size or wealth in the manufacturing districts (Keighley, for example) in which almost the ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... patent-office, schemers and speculators whose plans end in ruin, boon companions, brilliant talkers, sparkling orators, elegant and ornate poets who sing blithely for their own day and generation, preachers and statesmen who are ever led away by Utopian and millennial dreams; in short, men who may shine while they live, but are seldom remembered ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler

... the Girondins, and of the pure, altruistic, Utopian Republicanism for which they stood; and whilst he lived and laboured, their own endeavours to influence the people were all in vain. From his vile lodging in the Rue de l'Ecole de Medecine in Paris he span with his clever, wicked pen a web that paralysed ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini

... and the groans of the noble army of suffering martyrs, made, as it were, a kind of vacuum; and into that vacuum burst up the torrent-springs of a thousand souls—the thoughts that were no longer repressed—in the history of the past and the Utopian speculation on the future; in noble theology, capable statesmanship, and science at once brilliant and profound; in the voyage of discovery, and the change of the swan-like merchantman into a very fire-drake of war for the defence of the threatened shores; in the first brave ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald

... continual 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 ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth

... a time when the workers of the community may be grouped in co-operative bodies, either competing with one another, or related by some bond which shall minimize the friction of competition, while not impairing the freedom and integrity of each several group, is not perhaps a wild utopian vision. To students of English industrial history the transition to such a state will not appear more marked than the transition through which industry passed under the Industrial Revolution to the present capitalist system. But the recognition of this possible future does not justify us ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson

... wrong to others. This is the type of Timoleon, of Hampden, of Washington, and 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 which ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt

... a consuming disease. Out of patriotism—which can be respected as long as it remains in the domain of sentiment and art on exactly the same footing as the sense of family and local pride, all equally sacred—out of patriotism they make a Utopian and impracticable idea, unbalancing the world, a sort of cancer which drains all the living force, spreads everywhere and crushes life, a contagious cancer which culminates either in the crash of war or in the exhaustion ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse

... the great Union party from this loyal element of the southern states. No new theories of possible utopian good can compensate for the loss of such patriotism and devotion. Time, as he tells you in his message, is a great element of reform, and time is on your side. I remember the homely and encouraging words of a pioneer in the anti-slavery cause, an expelled Methodist preacher from ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman

... plan. Lapierre, however, had his own eminently more practical, if less Utopian, ideas concerning the erection of a trading-post; for in the quarter-breed's mind the planting of an independent trading-post upon the very threshold of MacNair's wilderness empire was of far greater importance than the establishment of a school, or mission, or any other institution—especially ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx

... 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 of the Christian rule of life,—the hesitating, ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers

... are not wrong," murmured Crisostomo in a low voice, "when you say that justice should seek to do good by rewarding virtue and educating the criminals. Only, it's impossible, Utopian! And where could be secured so much money, so ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal

... 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 ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele

... utilization of the whole nature of man. It will recognize as the first test of all political systems and moral codes whether or not they are "against human nature." It will insist that they be cut to fit the whole man, not merely a part of him. For there are utopian proposals made every day which cover about as much of a human being as a beautiful ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann

... do something not only for the bodily constitution and frame of his offspring, but for their intellectual and moral qualities. Both sexes ought to refrain from marriage if they are in any marked degree inferior in body or mind; but such hopes are Utopian and will never be even partially realised until the laws of inheritance are thoroughly known. Everyone does good service, who aids towards this end. When the principles of breeding and inheritance are better understood, we shall not ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin

... distrusted manufactures because they produced big cities and collected crowds; if he had 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

... features of 'Looking Backward,' that distinguish it from the generality of Utopian literature, lie in its definite scheme of industrial organization on a national basis, and the equal share allotted to all persons in the products of industry, or the public income, on the same ground that ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy

... 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 not ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... 13. Philosophic socialism. Sec. 14. Socialism in action. Sec. 15. Origin of the radical socialist party. Sec. 16. The two pillars of "scientific" socialism. Sec. 17. Aspects of the materialistic philosophy of history. Sec. 18. Utopian nature of "scientific" socialism. Sec. 19. Its unreal and negative character. Sec. 20. Revisionism and opportunism in the socialist party. Sec. 21. Alluring claims of party-socialism. Sec. 22. Growth and nature of the socialist ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter

... things bode and declare a new outbreak of the fire, to destroy old palaces of crime! May it fertilize also many vineyards! Here at this moment a successor of St. Peter, after the lapse of near two thousand years, is called "Utopian" by a part of this Europe, because he strives to get some food to the mouths of the leaner of his flock. A wonderful state of things, and which leaves as the best argument against despair, that men do not, cannot despair amid such dark ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... from lukewarmncss. For a lukewarm Church he would not condescend to legislate, nor did he regard it as at all inevitable that the Church should become lukewarm. He laid it as a duty upon the Church to reclaim the lost, because he did not think it utopian to suppose that the Church might be not in its best members only, but through its whole body, inspired by that ardour of humanity that can charm away the bad passions of the wildest heart, and open to the savage and the outlaw lurking ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church

... kinds of perpetual motion, one of which was applicable to the wits of newspaper editors and writers of every description. Professor Espy was here, with a tremendous storm in a gum-elastic bag. I could enumerate many more of these Utopian inventions; but, after all, a more imaginative collection is to be found in the Patent ...
— The Hall of Fantasy (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... 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 Bridge ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe

... revolution which is a utopian dream for Germany, not the general human emancipation, but rather the partial, the merely political revolution, the revolution which leaves the pillars of the house standing. Upon what can a partial, a merely political revolution base itself? Upon the fact that a part ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx

... absolutely without light to guide it. It had declined to extend the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific Ocean. Henry Clay had pronounced such division of public domain between the sections a "Utopian dream," and Zachary Taylor had condemned the principle in the only message he ever delivered to Congress. What Mr. Lincoln afterward embodied in his famous expression that the Union could never exist ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall

... less true that mere expediency does not of itself tend to establish a system of things any better than that which exists. While absolute morality owes to expediency the checks which prevent it from rushing into utopian absurdities; expediency is indebted to absolute morality for all stimulus to improvement. Granted that we are chiefly interested in ascertaining what is relatively right; it still follows that we must first consider what is absolutely right; since the one conception presupposes the other. That ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain

... govern? The merely lucky ones and the hereditary ones do 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 ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw

... brag of, and willingly would she support the right woman for President. If Victoria lived up to the high standard of the Woodhull Memorial, then even she might be that woman. After all, it was an era of radical theories and Utopian dreams, of extravagances of every sort. ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz

... all. And while middle-class citizens, and workmen infested with middle-class ideas admire their own rhetoric in the "Talking Shops," and "practical people" are engaged in endless discussions on forms of government, we, the "Utopian dreamers"—we shall have to consider the ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin

... the cock-pit for Sunday amusement," interrupted Lady Angleby sarcastically. "You are too Utopian, Sir Edward. Your colony will be a dismal failure and disappointment if you conduct it ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr

... is attested, alas! by the very character of the reformers by which this well-meaning Utopian attempted to oppose it. The good knight complains of the great advances of sensuality, and permits and advises the marriage of all knights. He complains of the accursed riches which the Hospitallers themselves were putting to a bad use, and forbade them in his Institutions; but nevertheless the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various

... wished that California would strike off a series of medals symbolic of some of the Utopian conditions which prevail there. I would like to suggest a model for one. I was walking once in the vicinity of the Ferry with a woman who knows the labor movement of California as well as an outsider may. Suddenly she whispered ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin

... support of moderate minds. Doctrines 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 ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton

... that time many other schemes of similar kind have made their appearance, the enumeration and discussion of which is outside our present purpose. So much is certain that all these schemes were Utopian. Nevertheless, a League of Nations having once come into existence, International Law grew more and more, and when in 1625 Hugo Grotius published his immortal work on 'The Law of War and Peace,' the system of International Law offered in his work ...
— The League of Nations and its Problems - Three Lectures • Lassa Oppenheim

... 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 ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various

... Oxford Professor of Logic, which treat of the department of Fallacies. Perhaps Bentham's Book of Fallacies is too political for me to commend it to you here. But if there happens to be any one in Birmingham who is fond of meeting proposed changes by saying that they are Utopian; that they are good in theory, but bad in practice; that they are too good to be realised, and so forth, then I can promise him that he will in that book hear of something very much to ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 1: On Popular Culture • John Morley

... movement in all countries shows that it is not, like Socialism, a dream of Utopian theorists, but the result of economic necessities. In its aim, its means of action, and its tendencies, Syndicalism presents no kinship with Socialism. Having sufficiently explained it in my Political Psychology, it will suffice here to recall in a few words the difference ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon

... some Utopian philosophy and too much insistence on the self-sufficiency of the individual, Walden has proved a regenerative force in the lives of many readers who have not passed the plastic stage. The book develops a love for even commonplace natural objects, and, like poetry, discloses a new world ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck

... satisfaction the substitution of the Consular for the Directorial government, and entertained no personal dislike to the First Consul. Among the Chateaux, more than anywhere else, it had always been the custom to cherish Utopian ideas respecting the management of public affairs, and to criticise the acts of the Government. It is well known that at this time there was not in all France a single old mansion surmounted by its two weathercocks which had not a systems of policy peculiar to itself, and ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... Society were in the main on things abstract or Utopian. Social Reconstruction was a constant theme, Hubert Bland outlined "Revolutionary Prospects" in January, 1885, and Bernard Shaw in February combated "The proposed ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease

... violent disruption of great material interests that now are wedded together. The dream of separate State sovereignty, our great Union split into two or more confederacies, prosperous and peaceable, is Utopian. So far from the secession doctrine carried out leading to peace and prosperity, it can only lead to perpetual war and adversity. The request to be 'let alone,' is simply a request that the nation should consent to see the Constitution ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various

... counsellor, a man of practice and of facts, uncontrolled by principles and wise in ancestral experience, replied: "We must not listen to this dreamer, this theorist, this innovator, this Utopian, this political economist, this friend to N*w Y*rk. We would be entirely ruined if the embarrassments of the road were not carefully weighed and exactly equalized between N*w Y*rk and M*ntr**l. There would be ...
— What Is Free Trade? - An Adaptation of Frederic Bastiat's "Sophismes Econimiques" - Designed for the American Reader • Frederic Bastiat

... first time she was sent out of the ark. If there was rest for the soles of their feet, it was all that could be said. There was no promise of a place to sit down; and as for lying down and getting their natural rest, the idea was Utopian. ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner

... covering a territory nearly equal in area to the whole of Europe, carried on by a republican government elected by universal suffrage, and guaranteeing to every tiniest village its full meed of local independence,—the very idea of all this would have been scouted as a thoroughly impracticable Utopian dream. And such scepticism would have been quite justifiable, for European history did not seem to afford any precedents upon which such a forecast of the future could be logically based. Between the various nations of Europe there has certainly ...
— American Political Ideas Viewed From The Standpoint Of Universal History • John Fiske

... establishment of a strong central power well disposed towards sage reforms of a social, administrative, and financial character, with men like Lamartine to elaborate them; and to a government of this kind he could have given his support. When he realized that the trend of events was towards a Republic of Utopian experiment which he regarded as doomed to failure and disaster, he quietly dropped out of the struggle, and, leaving Paris once more in September, ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton

... vehemently denounce the slightest exercise of power in others have not the faintest objection to using it ruthlessly themselves. Bolshevism, then, is another phase, and anything but a pleasant phase, of Utopian Socialism, whatever use of the name of Karl Marx be made ...
— Bolshevism: A Curse & Danger to the Workers • Henry William Lee

... 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 trying to ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... also 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 ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle

... policy and recklessness. He was educated up 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 ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland

... exulted in their toughness, they called themselves "grizzlies" and "mountain cats" and what not; they sang wild songs about their irritability, their motto was "Treat 'em rough!" It was a scary atmosphere for a dreamer and utopian; Jimmie Higgins shrank into himself, afraid even to reach about for some fellow-Socialist with whom he might exchange opinions about the events of ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair

... 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 ...
— Enoch Soames - A Memory of the Eighteen-nineties • Max Beerbohm

... 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 ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... men more solicitous for acquired rights than for general political principle, that Protestant statesmen who disestablished their own Church could feel a very sincere interest in the welfare of another. Ministers so Utopian as to give up solid goods for an imaginary righteousness seemed, as practical advisers, open to grave suspicion. Mr. Gladstone was feared as the apostle of those doctrines to which Rome owes many losses. Public opinion in England was not ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... unexplored regions, covered by interminable forests, where 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 ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding

... solid matters also have been precipitated, some crystals of poetry translucent, symmetrical, enduring. The immediate practical outcome was disappointing, and the external history of the agitation is a record of failed experiments, spurious sciences, Utopian philosophies, and sects founded only to dwindle away or be reabsorbed into some form of {439} orthodoxy. In the eyes of the conservative, or the worldly-minded, or of the plain people who could not understand the enigmatic utterances of the reformers, the dangerous or ludicrous sides of ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... a head crammed with schemes for the political regeneration of the whole world, and a trunkful of French fashions, neither of which, as I reckoned, were likely to take much with us. He made me laugh inwardly twenty times a-day by his Utopian theories and fancies. Truth to tell, in matters of politics or of sound common sense, these Frenchmen are for the most part mere children, and reach their dying day without ever becoming men. Take them by their weak points, their unlimited vanity or their love of what they call glory, and you may ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various

... mean to say that we have entered the Utopian age, for the present international situation is a peculiar one, since we are at the same time blessed with peace and cursed with militarism. This is not an age of war, yet we are burdened by great and ever-increasing armaments; the mad race for naval supremacy continues, while the relative strength ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association

... children. Personally, I should like, while the child is very young, I mean in main, not in years, to exclude the element of dramatic excitement, but though this may be possible for the individual child, it is quite Utopian to hope that we can keep the average child free from what is in the atmosphere. Children crave for excitement, and unless we give it to them in legitimate form, they will take it in any riotous form it presents itself, and if from our experience we can control their mental ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock

... their powers on the work in hand without wasting time or energy on unnecessary aches and pains; people whose bodies are kept up to the top notch of vitality by well-digested food, well-slept sleep, well-forgotten fatigue, and well-used reserve energy. That such a state of affairs is no Utopian dream, but is merely a matter of knowing how, will appear more clearly in ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury

... removed by general learning. If all men are learned, the work of the world will be performed by learned men; and why, under such circumstances, should not every vocation that is honest be equally honorable? But if this, in a broad view, seem utopian, can we not agree that learning is the only means by which a poor man can escape from his poverty? And, if it furnish certain means of escape for one man, will it not furnish equally certain means of escape for many? And if so, is not learning ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell

... cast on his shoulders, only served to disguise the old man without in any degree changing him. When my father conspired, it was not for the emperor, it was against the Bourbons; for M. Noirtier possessed this peculiarity, he never projected any Utopian schemes which could never be realized, but strove for possibilities, and he applied to the realization of these possibilities the terrible theories of The Mountain,—theories that never shrank from any means that were deemed necessary to bring about ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... 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, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... this sum, however, a reduction in the army and navy establishments was necessary. This Gallatin soon found to be too radical a measure for success, either in the cabinet or Congress, however well it may have accorded with Jefferson's utopian views. In the budget of 1802 the internal revenue, $650,000, was, therefore, a necessary item. The expenditures ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens

... complete and painful as if these obstructed activities were instinctive. This is not true merely in the melodramatic instances of drug addicts and drunkards. It is true in the case of social habits which have become established in a large group. Any Utopian that dreams of revolutionizing society overnight fails to take into account the enormous control of habits over groups which have acquired them, and the powerful emotions, amounting sometimes to passion, which are ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman

... first canto, fresh from the description of the female college, with its professoresses, and hostleresses, and other utopian monsters, we turn the ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... multitude of men and women, which were in Utopia multiplied, for number, like grasshoppers upon the face of the land. You understand well enough, nor is it needful further to explain it to you, that the Utopian men had so rank and fruitful genitories, and that the Utopian women carried matrixes so ample, so gluttonous, so tenaciously retentive, and so architectonically cellulated, that at the end of every ninth month seven children at the least, what male what female, were brought forth by every ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais

... also that which alone of good right may claim and take upon it the name of a commonwealth or weal-publique," quoth he. But, in the meantime, I, Thomas More, as I cannot agree and consent to all things that he said, so must I needs confess and grant that many things be in the Utopian weal-publique which in our cities I may rather ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various

... worse follies of the demagogues who now rage in the country. Vastly less picturesque than Blasco Ibanez, he is nearer the normal Spaniard—the Spaniard who, in the long run, must erect a new structure of society upon the half archaic and half Utopian chaos now reigning in the peninsula. Thus his book, though it is addressed to Spaniards, should have a certain value for English-speaking readers. And so it ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja

... continually outran practice and that it endowed mankind much more with ideas or ideals than with practical illustrations or models for our imitation. Yet again we must not exaggerate or imagine these ideas as merely Utopian or such stuff as dreams are made of. The ferment which they set up burst the fabric of Greek social and political institutions, but it clarified and steadied down, as the enthusiasms of youth may do, into the sober designs of grave and ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various

... "set the wolves to form protective enactments for the sheep. I fear, my good sir, that such a scheme is much too Utopian for any practically beneficial purpose. In the meantime, if it can be done, let it. No legislation, however, will be able, in my mind, to bind so powerful a class as the landlords of Ireland are, unless ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton

... set up the grand conception of an universal peace as the goal for which all that is best among men is inevitably making. Still, I trust that in our enthusiasm for ethic and for the ideal of its master, we have not lost our heads and betaken ourselves to Utopian impracticabilities. No ethical man could think of fixing a limit within which a national disarmament must take place, and the swords of the world beaten into ploughshares, any more than he could name the date at which the millennium is to be introduced. But this implies no ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan

... a 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 ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee

... science and working to a logical conclusion the industrial system of to-day. Its triumph had not been simply a triumph over Nature, but a triumph over Nature and the fellow-man. This, I must warn you, was my theory at the time. I had no convenient cicerone in the pattern of the Utopian books. My explanation may be absolutely wrong. I still think it is the most plausible one. But even on this supposition the balanced civilization that was at last attained must have long since passed its zenith, and was now far fallen into decay. The too-perfect security of the Upper-worlders ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

... News from Nowhere. Or an epoch of rest, being some chapters from a utopian romance. New York, 1910. [First ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... had found 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 in one. Curates and ...
— Dr. Wortle's School • Anthony Trollope

... 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 ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey

... are mistaken, sir; I am exceedingly prosaic in my views, and cherish no Utopian dreams and theories. I do indeed take the old matter-of-fact world as I find it, and try to make the best ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe

... that every husbandman is to be a freeholder, is as Utopian in practice, as it would be to expect that all men were to be on the same level in fortune, condition, education and habits. As such a state of things as the last never yet did exist, it was probably never designed by divine wisdom that it should exist. The ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper

... whatever millennial state Ruskin sought to usher his little band of English followers and disciples, one must speak appreciatively of his motives in projecting the scheme, and of the money and labor he personally lavished upon the Utopian project. Reverently also must one speak of the catholic creed to which its members were asked to subscribe: namely, to trust in God, recognize the nobleness of human nature, labor faithfully with one's might, be loyal to one's common country, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord

... the reproach of Utopian opinions may more justly be thrown upon his opponents. The latter do not escape the evil from which they fly. They proceed upon the belief that man is unfit for self-government; but since every government is one of men, if he cannot control ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various

... with strange people and strange 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

... may be Utopian. I much fear it will never be made a blessed reality by either philosophy or religion. We have had both for forty centuries, yet the fool has become ever more offensive and the liar has overrun the land. Yet we imagine that because ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... world. The young bird was fledged, and flew away. Poor George III. with his cackling was certainly not efficacious in restraining such a flight. But it is gratifying to see how this new people, when they had it in their power to change all their laws, to throw themselves upon any Utopian theory that the folly of a wild philanthropy could devise, to discard as abominable every vestige of English rule and English power,—it is gratifying to see that, when they could have done all this, they did not do so, but preferred to cling to things ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope

... early in the year 1787 that the empress began her journey towards her Utopian city, to receive the homage of its citizens and to exhibit to the world the magnificence of her reign. Great projects were in the air. Poland had just been cut into fragments and distributed among the hungry kingdoms around. The same was to be done ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... astonishment was, that Jews, Protestants, and Catholics, all flocked alike, and frequently, at the SAME TIME, to exercise their particular forms of worship within this church!—a circumstance, almost partaking of the felicity of an Utopian commonwealth. I observed, indeed, a small crucifix upon the altar, which confirmed me in the belief that the Lutheran worship, according to the form of the Augsbourg confession, was practised here; and the verger told me there was no other place of worship in the village. His information ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... 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 ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope

... as sociology is concerned. Machiavelli shocked the moral sense of his time, if not the moralists of all time, when he proposed to accept human nature as it is as a basis for political science. Herbert Spencer insisted upon the futility of expecting "golden conduct from leaden instincts." To the utopian social reformers of his day he pointed out a series of welfare measures in England in which the outcome was the direct opposite of ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... both in England and in France. It is also true that in France, during the revolution of 1848, Socialism for a brief period acquired considerable influence in the State. But the Socialists who preceded Marx tended to indulge in Utopian dreams and failed to found any strong or stable political party. To Marx, in collaboration with Engels, are due both the formulation of a coherent body of Socialist doctrine, sufficiently true or plausible to dominate the minds of vast numbers of men, and the formation of the International ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell

... better or worse education of women is one far too important for vague sentiment, wild aspirations, or Utopian dreams. ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley

... heels of this last stroke of good fortune for Castile came the news that the old King of Aragon, Fernando's father, was dead, and now, in truth, came that unity of Spain which had been the dream of more than one Utopian mind in days gone by. With fortune smiling upon them in so many ways, the sovereigns of this united realm were still confronted by many serious problems of government, especially in Castile, which called for speedy settlement. The long years of weak and vicious administration had ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger

... 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 ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald

... strain and of cleavage. The single-stratum condition of society cannot be reached without a profound inward change; politics are still stirred and shaken by conflicts, and society by the strife of classes. A very different picture from the promised Utopian Paradise of a common ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau

... idea is 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 ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France

... lull in that storm of insolence and mendacity designed to embarrass the Government of the United States in the august and solemn championship of human liberty committed to its charge. And let it be remarked that our expectations of English approval were never Utopian. The great principle involved in the American contest was so far above the level of the ordinary pursuits of men, that, even among ourselves, few have been able to transfuse it into their daily consciousness. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various

... and obvious criticism on all this is that it is utopian, that such households do not generally exist, because neither masters nor servants possess the qualities needed to maintain these relations of unbroken order and friendliness. Perhaps not; and masters and servants will be ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... to gold and silver with which to pay for labor and purchase the productions of the valleys, a community could be established in the country independent of foreign resources. The result will show the success or failure of this Utopian scheme. ...
— Building a State in Apache Land • Charles D. Poston

... 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 ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various

... but one utopia against another, and everything one says must be abstract and hypothetical. Subject to this criticism and caution, I will try to characterize in abstract strokes the opposite imaginative forces, and point out what to my own very fallible mind seems the best Utopian hypothesis, the most promising ...
— Memories and Studies • William James

... 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 censure which is allowed to the theorists, the builders of ideal states somewhere in the clouds. On his own behalf he expressly disclaims any such intention. "To sequester out of the world," he says, "into Atlantic and Utopian politics, which never can be drawn into use, will not mend our condition; but to ordain wisely as in this world of evil, in the midst whereof God has placed us unavoidably." Poetry might well have served him, if his object had been to add another to imaginary commonwealths. He took ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh

... Gotthelf (1797-1854), and chosen, 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 the Inferno. There ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... dared to 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

... itself &c (thought) 451. Adj. imagined &c v.; ben trovato [It]; air drawn, airbuilt^. imagining &c 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^ &c 4; illusory &c (fallacious) 495. fabulous, legendary; mythical, mythic, mythological; chimerical; imaginary, visionary; notional; fancy, fanciful, fantastic, fantastical^; whimsical; fairy, fairy-like; gestic^. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... horse determine the dimensions of an engine. It mattered nothing that from the first the passenger was ridiculously cramped, hampered, and crowded in the carriage. He had always been cramped in a coach, and it would have seemed "Utopian"—a very dreadful thing indeed to our grandparents—to propose travel without cramping. By mere inertia the horse-cart gauge, the 4 ft. 81/2 in. gauge, nemine contradicente, established itself in the world, and now everywhere the train is dwarfed to a scale that limits ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... them in a position to discharge their obligations to the State. It is all very easy to talk about the obvious necessity of giving more land to cultivators who have not enough to live upon; and there is, no doubt, a poetic justice in the Utopian agrarianism which dangles before the eyes of the Connaught peasantry the alternative of Heaven or Leinster. But when we come down to practical economics, and face the task of giving to a certain number of human beings, in an extremely backward ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett

... 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

... 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

... are all 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 consequences of his own thoughtlessness, ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns

... equality; but, as men are not ranked in this world by the different degrees of their 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 ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding

... the time when it again experiences the desire for rebirth. But from this realm inventors bring down their original ideas; there the philanthropist obtains the clearest vision of how to realize his utopian dreams and the spiritual aspirations of the saintly ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel

... path to religious belief. Almost alone amongst his class, he was far-sighted enough to perceive, at any rate in the latter years of his life, that the only hope of New Zealand lay in annexation, and that any dream of a Protestant Paraguay was Utopian. Quite naturally, but most unfortunately, most missionaries thought otherwise, and were at the outset of colonization placed in antagonism to the pioneers. Meanwhile they taught the elements of a rough-and-ready civilization, which ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves

... his employ and they are all well paid and industrious; all well-to-do, able to live well, educate their children well, and have time for some culture and recreation for themselves and their families. I told him that his ideas were Utopian, but he says they have succeeded even better than he expected they would. But there will come a crash some time, I am sure. There must be rich and there must be poor in this world, or the Scriptures will not ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley

... Thomas More, the author of the "Utopia," a romance in the scholastic garb. It describes an imaginary commonwealth, the chief feature of which is a community of property, on an imaginary island, from which the book takes its name. The epithet "Utopian" is still used as descriptive of ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta

... associates. As to Brissot and Marat, who are ostentatious humanitarians, their knowledge of France and of foreign countries consists in what they have seen through the dormer windows of their garrets, and through utopian spectacles. In minds like these, empty or led astray, the Contrat-Social could not fail to become a gospel; for it reduces political science to a strict application of an elementary axiom which relieves them of all study, and hands society over to the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... can't relax a little, just among us here, you know. We'd never tell. Why, he won't even play a little game of poker! And he doesn't smoke! Imagine it—not even when he's by himself, and no one would know! Isn't that odd? But he can preach. He's really very interesting; only a little too Utopian in his ideas. He thinks everybody ought to be good, you know, and all that sort of thing. He really thinks it's possible, and he lives that way himself. He really does. But he is a wonderful person; only I feel sorry for his wife sometimes. She's quite a cultured person. Has been wealthy, ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill

... educated mind and a certain dogged obstinacy, which caused him to surmount all difficulties. He prospered amazingly. But money, instead of numbing his activities, only sharpened them, and he soon began to formulate his ideal—the Utopian dream of an entirely British Africa from the Cape to ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke

... and Fairies of Spenser, have no connection with popular superstition, being only words used to denote an Utopian scene of action, and imaginary or allegorical characters; and the title of the "Fairy Queen" being probably suggested by the elfin mistress of Chaucer's Sir Thopas. The stealing of the Red Cross Knight, while a child, is the only incident in the poem which ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott

... 414 B.C. Euelpides and Pisthetaerus, disgusted with the state of things at Athens, build a new and improved city, Cloud-cuckoo-town, in the kingdom of the birds. Some see an allusion to the Sicilian expedition, and Alcibiades' Utopian schemes. ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al

... others. Yet all earthly evils have their compensations, and even monotony is not without its secret joy. For a time we drop out of the larger world, with its interests and its obligations, and become the independent citizens of a tiny State:—a Utopian State where few toil and none go hungry—bounded on all sides by the sea and vassal only to the winds and waves. Here during a period which is too long while it lasts, too short when it is over, we may placidly reflect on the busy world that lies behind and the tumult that is before ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill

... of all time, when he proposed to accept human nature as it is as a basis for political science. Herbert Spencer insisted upon the futility of expecting "golden conduct from leaden instincts." To the utopian social reformers of his day he pointed out a series of welfare measures in England in which the outcome was the direct opposite ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... mere desert and wilderness; and did transport them (not) so much for the excessive multitude of men and women, which were in Utopia multiplied, for number, like grasshoppers upon the face of the land. You understand well enough, nor is it needful further to explain it to you, that the Utopian men had so rank and fruitful genitories, and that the Utopian women carried matrixes so ample, so gluttonous, so tenaciously retentive, and so architectonically cellulated, that at the end of every ninth month seven children at the least, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais

... Government can evacuate Petrograd, then a state of siege declared, and the military commander of the district can deal with these gentlemen without legal formalities.... Or if, for example, the Constituent Assembly manifests any Utopian tendencies, it can be ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed

... passage is almost literally taken from Essay I. 30, 'On Cannibals.' We shall later on show Shakspere's reason for giving us this fanciful description of such an Utopian commonwealth. ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis

... 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, ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys

... the healthful but unflattering realism of Jeremias Gotthelf (1797-1854), and chosen, 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 the ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... more landed in his native province of Calabria, and reached Naples, a wiser and better man than he had left it. Three years' study and reflection had cooled the rash fervour of his youthful aspirations. His desire for his country's freedom was unabated, but his Utopian visions of a republic had lost much of the brilliant colouring that had dazzled his boyish imagination. Prudence told him that it was unwise, by aiming at too much, to risk obtaining nothing. He was not singular in this modification of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various

... being called "Utopian" I would submit that the world is not so foolish as to allow that sort of thing to go on indefinitely. It is, indeed, quite a recent human development. All this great business of armament upon commercial lines is the growth of half a century. But it has grown with the vigor of an evil weed, it ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... Plato, a utopian, organized his ideal republic in the name of science, which, through modesty and euphemism, he called philosophy. Aristotle, a practical man, refuted the Platonic utopia in the name of the same philosophy. ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon

... seldom read, and may be passed over lightly. We mention only, as indicative of his wide range, his History of Henry VII, his Utopian romance The New Atlantis, his Advancement of Learning and his Novum Organum. The last two works, one in English, the other in Latin, were parts of the Instauratio Magna, or The Great Institution of True Philosophy, a colossal ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long

... knowledge as the best path to religious belief. Almost alone amongst his class, he was far-sighted enough to perceive, at any rate in the latter years of his life, that the only hope of New Zealand lay in annexation, and that any dream of a Protestant Paraguay was Utopian. Quite naturally, but most unfortunately, most missionaries thought otherwise, and were at the outset of colonization placed in antagonism to the pioneers. Meanwhile they taught the elements of ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves

... they called themselves "grizzlies" and "mountain cats" and what not; they sang wild songs about their irritability, their motto was "Treat 'em rough!" It was a scary atmosphere for a dreamer and utopian; Jimmie Higgins shrank into himself, afraid even to reach about for some fellow-Socialist with whom he might exchange opinions about the events of ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair

... memory left of anything that ever was dreamed or done within it. That is the inevitable issue of such a "risky" universe. When scientifically-minded men, therefore, now take a long look ahead, the Utopian visions of the mid-Victorian age are not foremost in their thought. Rather, as one ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick

... of a woman's heart and cherish them yourself as long as you need them, as long as your children require a nurse to love them, and then to blight and thwart and destroy them, whenever your own use for them is at an end. This may be Utopian; but it is always a little thing if one mother or two mothers can be brought to feel more tenderly to those who share their toil and have no part ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the book 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 ...
— Utopia • Thomas More

... French critics, M. Caro, a member of the Academy, who deals somewhat austerely with her religiose enthusiasms and with her Utopian projects for social reformation, remarks gravely and ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert

... B. Some day, perhaps, he may read this letter and realise how extremely awkward an inflexible standard of morality can make things for one's neighbours. The last sentence of all has a pathetic ring, as of a Utopian throwing up the sponge: "I think much better to add little serpent-like wisdom to upright manhood and thus found ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 17, 1914 • Various

... 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 in the ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various

... d'Orleans is named Lieutenant-general of France. It is asserted, that this appointment has been effected by the influence of General Lafayette over the provisional government; but how little in accordance is this measure with the well-known Utopian scheme of a republic, which has for years been the favourite ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner

... 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 ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee

... Shelley was in no sense an inflammatory demagogue; however visionary may have been the hopes he indulged, he based those hopes upon the still more Utopian foundation of a sudden ethical reform, and preached a revolution without bloodshed. We find in them, moreover, the germs of "The Revolt of Islam", where the hero plays the part successfully in fiction, which the poet had attempted without appreciable result in practice at Dublin. ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds

... this interesting experiment is said by good authorities to have worked well. It is not a socialistic or Utopian scheme, but frankly accepts existing conditions and tries to make the best of them. It is not by any means merely "playing at house." The children have to do genuine work, and learn habits of real industry, thrift, self-restraint, and independence. The measures discussed ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead

... opinion common among philosophers of his time. J. J. Rousseau it was who made the idea popular, and it met with widespread acceptance for many years. It is not surprising, therefore, that the phrase has long been a favorite with the demagogue and the utopian. Even now the doctrine is by no means dead. The American educational system is based largely on this dogma, and much of the political system seems to be grounded on it. It can be seen in the tenets of labor unions, in the practice of many philanthropies—traces may be found almost anywhere ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson

... legislation. Bentham's works are very voluminous, and they cover, wisely and well, almost every department of domestic, social, public, and national life. The worst that can be said of his political writings is that they are in advance of the age,—literally Utopian;(24) for it would be well with the country which was prepared to embody his views. But, unfortunately, his principles have no power of self-realization. They are like a watch, perfect in all other parts, but ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody

... 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 and faithless, governing for their own interests only. ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb

... of that principle, or who would wish to reduce the freedom of the individual to a smaller measure? Whatever social tyranny may have existed twenty years ago, when it wrung that fiery protest from the lips of John Stuart Mill, can we imagine a state of society, not totally Utopian, in which the individual man need be less ashamed of his social fetters, in which he could more freely utter all his honest convictions, more boldly propound all his theories, more fearlessly agitate for their speedy realization; in which, in fact, each man can be so entirely himself ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller

... as tending to the clear profit of his species. No sane mind in a sane body resolves upon a real crime. It is a man of violent passions, bloodshot eyes, and swollen veins, that alone can grasp the knife of murder. The system of a simple diet promises no Utopian advantages. It is no mere reform of legislation, whilst the furious passions and evil propensities of the human heart, in which it had its origin, are still unassuaged. It strikes at the root of all evil, and is an experiment which may be tried with ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... 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 ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... 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 into the world: not the mere knowledge of results, to which, except for the practical ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill

... son replied carelessly. "I don't remember Uncle Phil much. Jeff's a queer fellow, full of Utopian notions about brotherhood and that sort of thing. But he's practical in a way. He gets things done in ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine

... raise a ripple on the social pool of the Western Hemisphere. But to the self-chosen few who suffered shipwreck and privation, financial loss from their already depleted store, disaster to their Utopian dreams, and a great void in their hearts where once had been love of country, it became ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain

... of wealth to be the liberty to pick at will one's employees and allies, one's friends and agents, to repel the dishonest and rebuke the impudent, dealing with those whom one chooses to deal with, where personal choice can fairly be exercised; but such a privilege is Utopian in business, even among men of fortune, and envied Ritchie has little more freedom than humble Jones. Besides, the pursuit of startling success, though it often ruins possibilities of contentment, rarely ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various

... the fact of the poverty of the country on the voluntary contributions of which it had to depend. One may well ask if the exponents of the new policy have any confidence that the same obstacle will not stand in the way of more than a trivial fraction of their extensive, and as I think Utopian, proposals. The No Rent Manifesto fell flat in the midst of the very bitterest struggle of the land war. Does anyone think it likely that we shall see behind the doctrinaires of the Sinn Fein group a country united in cold blood to repudiate its obligations under ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell

... found 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 in one. Curates and ushers are generally unmarried. ...
— Dr. Wortle's School • Anthony Trollope

... wool in abundance. This would be the true country for emigration from our impoverished islands, and will, of course, be crowded when conveyances shall become more manageable. A railroad across Canada must still be a rather Utopian conception, but it might be well worth the expense of making by government, even though it produced nothing for the next half-dozen years, for the multitudes whom it would carry through the heart of this superb country in the half-dozen years after, and for the wealth which they would pour into England ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various

... Mr. Schenck against the plan proposed by the committee was, that it failed to offer inducements for a gradual enfranchisement of the negro. He said: "Now, sir, I am not one of those who entertain Utopian ideas in relation, not merely to the progress, but to the immediate change of sentiment, opinions, and practice among the people of those States that have so lately been slave States, and so recently in rebellion. I believe that, like all other people, ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes

... minds. Doctrines 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

... dropped into a winged armchair by the well-swept hearth, on which a piled-up fire of pine logs was burning cheerily. And whilst he waited now he gave his friend the latest news of the events in Rennes. Young, ardent, enthusiastic, and inspired by Utopian ideals, he passionately denounced the rebellious ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini

... to the grand height she has held. It is hinted at in the Bhagavad-Gita:—"whatsoever is practised by the most excellent men"; again, it is the Aryan doctrine of the Guruparampara Chain. The whole idea is so remote from modern practice and theory that it must seem to the west utopian, even absurd; but we have Asoka's reign in India, and Confucius's Ministry in Lu, to prove its basic truth. During that Ministry he had flashed the picture of such a ruler on to the screen of time: and it was enough. ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... 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

... thing to say to my brother journalist, Horace Greeley, and that is that the Utopian ideas which have for so many years formed the principal topic of his radical sheet ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn

... which was applicable to the wits of newspaper editors and writers of every description. Professor Espy was here, with a tremendous storm in a gum-elastic bag. I could enumerate many more of these Utopian inventions; but, after all, a more imaginative collection is to be found in the Patent ...
— The Hall of Fantasy (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... scarlet-fever story was probably an extemporaneous work of fiction, got up to gratify the Hibernian anger at Ann, and that it wasn't in the least worth while to believe one thing more than another from the fact that any of the tribe said it. But she refuses to be comforted, and is so Utopian as to lie there, crying,—'Oh, if I only could get one that I could trust,—one that really would speak the truth to me,—one that I might know really went where she said she went, and really did as she said she did!' To have to live so, she says, and bring up little children ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various

... shall buy the church next door and I shall make a school. It shall be a school where you learn to do one useful thing that will earn your bread and butter. And the rest of the time—you shall dream." Babiche was a patient listener. But even Babiche yawned at all the Utopian theories with which her ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke

... contribution To discuss the Constitution And the Spanish war's forgot For a new Utopian spot; And the very latest phase Is ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson

... 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

... a pedant nor yet a revolutionary: his theories were Utopian and he had an extraordinary overpowering ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... strange people and strange 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 ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland

... here, you know. We'd never tell. Why, he won't even play a little game of poker! And he doesn't smoke! Imagine it—not even when he's by himself, and no one would know! Isn't that odd? But he can preach. He's really very interesting; only a little too Utopian in his ideas. He thinks everybody ought to be good, you know, and all that sort of thing. He really thinks it's possible, and he lives that way himself. He really does. But he is a wonderful person; only I feel sorry for his wife sometimes. ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill

... diversion 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, ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson

... vorstellen[Ger]. float in the mind; suggest itself &c. (thought) 451. Adj. imagined &c. v.; 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, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... now to cooerdinated efforts to accelerate progress, more conscious of the needs of a distant future, perhaps, or even of an ideal of universal efficiency as a means of realizing some one world purpose or many good purposes. This is not now, as it once might have been called, merely an Utopian dream. In some slight degree it is already being accomplished. Fifth, social and moral feelings are widened in scope, and must be still further extended; it is in the form of the democratic spirit, that these feelings must find expression. And this democratic spirit is on one ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge

... Such a pretension seems Utopian, and one asks oneself curiously what sort of balance the astronomers must have adopted in order to calculate the weight of Sun, Moon, planets ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion

... applauded. It seemed improbable to men more solicitous for acquired rights than for general political principle, that Protestant statesmen who disestablished their own Church could feel a very sincere interest in the welfare of another. Ministers so Utopian as to give up solid goods for an imaginary righteousness seemed, as practical advisers, open to grave suspicion. Mr. Gladstone was feared as the apostle of those doctrines to which Rome owes many losses. Public opinion in England was not prepared ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... of all war between the civilized nations of the world can, as I see it, only be brought about in two ways, both Utopian and likely impracticable, for many years to come. War could be made only to cease entirely if all the nations of Europe could be organized into a United States of Europe and if free trade were established throughout the world. In the first instance, the extreme nationalism, ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various

... competing ambition, for grouping and alliances and a precarious equipoise, the substitution for all these things of a real European partnership, based on the recognition of equal right and established and enforced by a common will. [Cheers.] A year ago that would have sounded like a Utopian idea. It is probably one that may not or will not be realized either today or tomorrow. If and when this war is decided in favor of the Allies, it will at once come within the range, and, before long, within the grasp of European statesmanship. [Cheers.] I go back ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various

... hands of the conservative party, opposed and prevented the formation of a body of reformers who, like Gizzi and Pius IX., would have labored intelligently to forward the cause of reform, never losing sight of the great principles of humanity and justice, never sacrificing to Utopian theories inalienable rights, above all the rights of property—the very groundwork of the social fabric. Without the aid and countenance of a body of reformers, the able ministry that now surrounded the Pope found it difficult to proceed. They could not determine for ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell

... 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 ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France

... which Napoleon cast on his shoulders, only served to disguise the old man without in any degree changing him. When my father conspired, it was not for the emperor, it was against the Bourbons; for M. Noirtier possessed this peculiarity, he never projected any Utopian schemes which could never be realized, but strove for possibilities, and he applied to the realization of these possibilities the terrible theories of The Mountain,—theories that never shrank from any means that were deemed necessary to bring about ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... mistaken, sir; I am exceedingly prosaic in my views, and cherish no Utopian dreams and theories. I do indeed take the old matter-of-fact world as I find it, and try to make ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe

... An Utopian dream it appears, if we note but one side of the picture. If we consider the lightness with which so many men look upon the physical form of women; and if we realize the attitude of so many women toward men, in their conflict with life, using the age-old dowry from mother Eve, of sex, as ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad

... peace, saying that the unlearned and the more vehement would not hear of concessions, since the Lutherans would then be charged with inconsistency and the Emperor would only increase his demands. (C. R. 3, 292.) Evidently then, even at that time Melanchthon was not entirely cured of his utopian dream. ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente

... foe of the Girondins, and of the pure, altruistic, Utopian Republicanism for which they stood; and whilst he lived and laboured, their own endeavours to influence the people were all in vain. From his vile lodging in the Rue de l'Ecole de Medecine in Paris he span with ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini

... might perhaps be evolved from a profound understanding of the Analogies of the Universe. It is important, however, in order that this theory, now when it is first presented, should not unnecessarily prejudice cautious and conservative minds, and seem to them wholly Utopian, to guard it by the additional statement that, while such a language might be appropriately denominated Universal, there is a sense in which it would still not be so; or, in other words, that it could only become Universal by causing to coalesce with its own scientifically organized structure, the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... constitution and frame of his offspring, but for their intellectual and moral qualities. Both sexes ought to refrain from marriage if they are in any marked degree inferior in body or mind; but such hopes are Utopian and will never be even partially realised until the laws of inheritance are thoroughly known. Everyone does good service, who aids towards this end. When the principles of breeding and inheritance are better understood, we shall not hear ignorant members of our legislature ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin

... own; he does not admit, of course in his own interest, that the public power, at least in the civil order of things and in common practice, should be illimitable nor, especially, arbitrary.[2324]—This is due to his not being an utopian or a theorist, like his predecessors of the Convention, but a perspicacious statesman, who is in the habit of using his own eyes. He sees things directly, in themselves; he does not imagine them through book formulae or party phrases, by a process of verbal reasoning, employing ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... inclined to Saxon individualism and revolutionary co-operation than to his socialism, in which he saw salvation, and which they regarded as pedantic and hybrid. Bismarck's system had no justification and derogated all laws of ethics and justice. With his Utopian schemes the professors in their lecture-rooms endeavored to excite the Socialists, who, if they had listened and demanded their realization would have been exposed to be shot down in the streets by the soldiery, without anyone being able even to raise a protest against ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various

... legisiative delegation from the city. If the refuse matter were taken from that, there would be nothing left. It has been proposed that the Legislature itself should be purified; but this idea is Utopian, PUNCHINELLO fears. If Niagara were squirted through its halls, the water would be dirtied, but the halls would not be cleansed. Alas, poor city! Trampled under the heels of the aristocratic HONG and PENNY BUNN, what is there to hope ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 6, May 7, 1870 • Various

... exclude lawyers, along with roving frontiersmen, from his colonies in Texas, and hoped thus to promote a utopian society. The lawyers got in, however. Their wit, the anecdotes of which they were both subject and author, and the political stories they made traditional from the stump, have not been adequately set down. As ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie

... you wanted us to turn everything over to the Paramounters and take our chances on a clean administration. Naturally, we're not going to do any such Utopian thing as that. What I want to know now is what it is going to cost us to do the practical and ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde

... wished to be led out, as they imagine that their undisciplined valour would be a match for the German army. They showed their sense by demanding that Dorian should be at the head of the new Government. He is not a Demagogue, he has written no despatches, nor made any speeches, nor decreed any Utopian reforms after the manner of his colleagues. But, unlike them, he is a practical man of business, and this the working men have had discernment enough to discover. They are hardly to be blamed if they have accepted literally the rhetorical figures of Jules Favre. When he said that, rather than ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere

... out with a profit. Just what may be his policy when this reaches him I cannot, after my experience with his ability as a lightning change artist, venture to predict; but my last information leads me to believe that he is championing the utopian plan of running the business, not only past the bulge, but into the slump. I, for one, will not permit my fortune to be jeopardized by so palpable a ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick

... could paint and draw. Mary and Eliza could take in needlework until more pleasant and profitable employment could be procured. Poverty and toil would be more than compensated for by the joy which freedom and congenial companionship would give them. There was nothing very Utopian in such a plan; but Fanny, when the time came for its accomplishment, grew frightened. Her hard apprenticeship had given her none of the self-confidence and reliance which belonged to Mary by right of birth. Her family, despite ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell

... 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 ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann

... edifice, its beauty and solidity were perfectly original, and different from the general rules and modern theories of surrounding nations. The country loved its liberty such as it found it, and not in the fashion of any Utopian plan traced by some new-fangled system of political philosophy. Inherently Protestant and commercial, the Dutch abhorred every yoke but that of their own laws, of which they were proud even in their abuse. They held in particular detestation ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan

... of the Latin races, to lay the 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 ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer

... enjoying only that portion of civilization which the presence of the police declares; and presenting a scene which the better orders hurry by with disgust? Or, on the contrary may we not, without giving ourselves up to Utopian dreams, imagine that we might enter the busy resorts of traffic through extensive suburbs consisting of cottages with their bits of land; and see, as we came along, symptoms everywhere around of housewifely occupations, and of homes which ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps

... went early in 1915 with a message of fellowship from English people to German people. There was some surprise, some tendency to view the message as Utopian, but always a cordial acknowledgment and a real goodwill. Dr. Siegmund Schulze was most heartily in sympathy. "He feels that the ultimate hope of peace lies in the increasing use of arbitration." "One very sweet-spirited elderly gentleman in Berlin ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton

... we should present in the stories for a normal group of children. Personally, I should like, while the child is very young, I mean in main, not in years, to exclude the element of dramatic excitement, but though this may be possible for the individual child, it is quite Utopian to hope that we can keep the average child free from what is in the atmosphere. Children crave for excitement, and unless we give it to them in legitimate form, they will take it in any riotous form it presents itself, and if from our ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock

... for Chloe Elliston's plan. Lapierre, however, had his own eminently more practical, if less Utopian, ideas concerning the erection of a trading-post; for in the quarter-breed's mind the planting of an independent trading-post upon the very threshold of MacNair's wilderness empire was of far greater ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx

... surrounded in Jena. Mellish passed through here yesterday, and has again taken up his abode in Doernburg. I hear a great deal about the merry life they are leading in Wilhelmsthal, where the proceedings are evidently very Utopian. My sister-in-law met with a serious accident in the carriage, which broke in two; however, she herself ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)

... 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 England—in a word, treated as princes. But then they were the friends of the great Cobden! ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various

... its author had just left Cambridge. Almost immediately afterward, it was decided that Young England ought to be represented in Parliament, where its Utopian chivalries, it was believed, needed only to be heard to prevail. Accordingly Lord John Manners presented himself, in June 1841, as one of the Conservative candidates for the borough of Newark. He was elected, ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse

... would not condescend to legislate, nor did he regard it as at all inevitable that the Church should become lukewarm. He laid it as a duty upon the Church to reclaim the lost, because he did not think it utopian to suppose that the Church might be not in its best members only, but through its whole body, inspired by that ardour of humanity that can charm away the bad passions of the wildest heart, and open to the savage and the outlaw lurking in moral wildernesses an entrancing view of the holy ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church

... into questions which we could discuss the rest of our lives," said Durtal, "I marvel at the placidity of the Utopian who imagines that man is perfectible. There is no denying that the human creature is born selfish, abusive, vile. Just look around you and see. Society cynical and ferocious, the humble heckled and pillaged by the rich ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans

... thing, "Co-operation," while utterly lacking in the Utopian qualities with which the word artist paints it, is a decidedly bigger factor in American affairs than the average ...
— The Dollar Hen • Milo M. Hastings

... this profound 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 ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various

... 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

... constitution affords to every one the means of enjoying at home; where property is secured from violence, and where the life of the meanest subject is equally protected with that of the prince. Let those visionary men, who amuse themselves in building Utopian governments, and those who, from real or fancied injury or neglect, feel the chagrin of disappointment, visit other countries, and experience how justice is administered in other nations; they will then be taught to confess that real liberty ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow

... 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 Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton

... and that of their predecessor, John Sobieski, the principles of these seminaries might be considered sound. But soon after the death of the last-named monarch, when the latent mischief contained in the Utopian idea of the perfection of an always elective monarchy began to shake the stability of even the monarchy itself, certain of the public teachers evinced correspondent signs of this destructive species of freemasonry; and about the same period ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter

... interested social reformers are working, and it is to be hoped that its advantages will soon appear so great that neither extreme alternative principle will have to be tried out thoroughly before there will be a general acceptance of the co-operative idea. It may seem utopian to those who are familiar with the selfishness and antagonism that have marked the history of the last hundred years, but it is already being tried out here and there, and it is the only principle that accords with the experiences and results of ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe

... "that is all Utopian, that is apocryphal, that is impossible." No. Yesterday, I cut out of a paper this: "One of the pleasantest incidents recorded in a long time is reported from Sheffield, England. The wages of the men in the iron works at Sheffield are regulated by a board of arbitration, by whose decision both masters ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage

... the last of the three working tools of the operative craftsman, is a symbol of equality of station. Not that equality of civil or social position which is to be found only in the vain dreams of the anarchist or the Utopian, but that great moral and physical equality which affects the whole human race as the children of one common Father, who causes his sun to shine and his rain to fall on all alike, and who has so appointed ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey

... well as to harmony: the attachment formed by the women, softened their demeanor, and facilitated their control. Such were his views, and they had many partisans: but in connection we learn, without astonishment, that he thought contemptuously of saintship, considered reformation utopian, and honesty rather the result of habit than of principle; the convicts, more unfortunate in their detection than peculiar in their crimes: capable of the devotion of hypocrites; hardly of repentance. The dash of libertinism which sparkles in the pages ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West

... exemption from censure which is allowed to the theorists, the builders of ideal states somewhere in the clouds. On his own behalf he expressly disclaims any such intention. "To sequester out of the world," he says, "into Atlantic and Utopian politics, which never can be drawn into use, will not mend our condition; but to ordain wisely as in this world of evil, in the midst whereof God has placed us unavoidably." Poetry might well have served him, if his object had been to add another to imaginary ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh

... Bernardin, through his imagination, was an Utopian visionary, an idyllic dreamer; through his temper, an angry disputant with society. His life was a fantastic series of adventures. Having read as a boy the story of Crusoe, and listened to the heroic record of the travels and ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden

... our society could not but advance with enormous strides in all that pertains to true civilization, since thinkers would then be the rule instead of the exception, and talent almost universal, which is now, like angels' visits, comparatively 'few and far between.' This is no Utopian vision: it is a reality within the scope of human exertion and the capacity of our people of to-day, if men would but exert themselves to such an end, and properly apply the energy and labor which is now too often excited upon unworthy ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... duration of the republics of antiquity, compared with that of monarchies, was very short. Republics are very easy to found, and very difficult to maintain, while with monarchies it is exactly the reverse. If it is Utopian schemes that are wanted, I say this: the only solution of the problem would be a despotism of the wise and the noble, of the true aristocracy and the genuine nobility, brought about by the method of generation—that is, by the marriage of the noblest men with the cleverest and most ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer









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