Browsing Topic Best Perfect Society Quotes

Children will still die unjustly even in a perfect society. Even by his greatest effort, man can only propose to diminish, arithmetically, the sufferings of the world.

Swedes are such a civilised, perfect society – at least on the surface. There’s a great safety net, a huge middle class, free education, free health care. People are very polite, they wait their turn. They’re not too loud, they’re not too quiet, but sometimes it’s a little too perfect.

Socrates said the perfect society would be based on a great lie. People would be told that lie from the cradle, and they would believe it, because human beings need to make order out of chaos.

Although images of perfection in people’s personal lives can cause unhappiness, images of perfect societies – utopian images – can cause monstrous evil. In fact, forcefully changing society to conform to societal images was the greatest cause of evil in the twentieth century.

Utopian fiction is really boring. I had to read a lot of it, and it’s not that much fun. But they’re fascinating to me as historical documents. Cabet [Icaria’s founder and author of the utopian novel, Travels in Icaria], is writing in the 1830s, and his idea of the perfect society reveals a lot about his time. But his book is uniquely bad.

As we grew to love South Australia, we felt that we were in an expanding society, still feeling the bond to the motherland, but eager to develop a perfect society in the land of our adoption.

Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache. They wanted to produce a perfect society by an endless continuation of something that had only been valuable because it was temporary. The wider course would be to say that there are certain lines along which humanity must move, the grand strategy is mapped out, but detailed prophecy is not our business. Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.

if we don’t begin by imagining the perfect society, how shall we create one?

The most perfect society is that whose purpose is the universal and supreme happiness.