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Paradise is exactly like where you are right now... only much, much better.
-Laurie Halse Anderson
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It gets to seem as if way back in the Garden of Eden after the Fall, Adam and Eve had begged the Lord to forgive them and He, in his boundless exasperation, had said, All right, then. Stay. Stay in the Garden. Get civilized. Procreate. Muck it up. And they did.
-Diane Arbus
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Santa Barbara is a paradise; Disneyland is a paradise; the U.S. is a paradise. Paradise is just paradise. Mournful, monotonous, and superficial though it may be, it is paradise. There is no other.
-Jean Baudrillard
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The Utopia the bible seems to want would have people hate evil when it is time to hate and suggests that people who turn away from the world to follow His word would in turn be hated and those people who hate them are to be humiliated in the end.
-James Dye
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A fool's paradise is a wise man's hell!
-Thomas Fuller
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The abominable effort to take one's sins with one to paradise.
-Andre Gide
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Utopias are presented for our inspection as a critique of the human state. If they are to be treated as anything but trivial exercises of the imagination. I suggest there is a simple test we can apply. We must forget the whole paraphernalia of social description, demonstration, expostulation, approbation, condemnation. We have to say to ourselves, How would I myself live in this proposed society? How long would it be before I went stark staring mad?
-William Golding
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Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labeled Utopian.
-Emma Goldman
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I shall speak of how melancholy and utopia preclude one another. How they fertilize one another... of the revulsion that follows one insight and precedes the next... of superabundance and surfeit. Of stasis in progress. And of myself, for whom melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.
-Gunther Grass
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A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists, all powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death.
-Ernest Hemingway
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From the very fountain of enchantment there arises a taste of bitterness to spread anguish amongst the flowers.
-Lucretius
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Everyone who has ever built anywhere a new heaven first found the power thereto in his own hell.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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We, who have already borne on the road to Paradise the lives of the best among us, want a difficult, erect, implacable Paradise; a Paradise where one can never rest and which has, beside the threshold of the gates, angels with swords.
-J. A. Primo De Rivera
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I should have no use for a paradise in which I should be deprived of the right to prefer hell.
-Jean Rostand
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We are at heart so profoundly anarchistic that the only form of state we can imagine living in is Utopian; and so cynical that the only Utopia we can believe in is authoritarian.
-Lionel Trilling
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It is a curious thing that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.
-Evelyn Waugh
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We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.
-Simone Weil
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Books about Paradise, Utopia
