Quotes About Dystopia

“A fictional Dystopia is better than a fake Utopia.”

— Robert Friedrich

“By the end of Barber's talk, this event she's celebrating sounds like a product of the imagination of some master of speculative fiction like Philip K. Dick or Ray Bradbury-a mad dystopia in which feminist dreams have led to a forest full of separate clearings in which more and more women keep to smaller and smaller groups for fear of encountering difference.”

— Bruce Bawer

“From our myopia arose our dystopia.”

— Anthony Marais

“Leyner's fiction is, in this regard, an eloquent reply to Gilder's prediction that our TV-culture problems can be resolved by the dismantling of images into discrete chunks we can recombine as we fancy. Leyner's world is a Gilder-esque dystopia. The passivity and schizoid decay still endure for Leyner in his characters' reception of images and waves of data. The ability to combine them only adds a layer of disorientation: when all experience can be deconstructed and reconfigured, there become simply too many choices. And in the absence of any credible, noncommercial guides for living, the freedom to choose is about as "liberating" as a bad acid trip: each quantum is as good as the next, and the only standard of an assembly's quality is its weirdness, incongruity, its ability to stand out from a crowd of other image-constructs and wow some Audience.”

— David Foster Wallace

“I put it to the great man [Hitchcock], the key to fictitious terror is partition or containment: so long as the Bates Motel is sealed off from our world, we want to peer in, like at a scorpion enclosure. But a film that shows the world is a Bates Motel, well, that's ... the stuff of Buchloe, dystopia, depression. We'll dip our toes in a predatory, amoral, godless unive3rse, but only our toes.”

— David Mitchell

“Once you get into the world of dystopia, it's hard to avoid plagiarism, because other people have had such powerful visions.”

— Anthony Horowitz

“The future is always a dystopia in movies.”

— Alex Cox

“The beauty of dystopia is that it lets us vicariously experience future worlds - but we still have the power to change our own.”

— Ally Condie

“When we read dystopia, we root for these people to break free because we are these people; hoping and fighting against things that are bigger than ourselves.”

— Ally Condie

“CCTV is seen either as a symbol of Orwellian dystopia or a technology that will lead to crime-free streets and civil behaviour. While arguments continue, there is very little solid data in the public domain about the costs, quantity and effectiveness of surveillance.”

— Heather Brooke

“Our problem right now is that we're so specialized that if the lights go out, there are a huge number of people who are not going to know what to do. But within every dystopia there's a little utopia.”

— Margaret Atwood

“I'm a writer; as soon as I imagine what would happen if I found the fountain of youth, it turns into a dystopia in my head.”

— Marie Brennan

“In movies and in television the robots are always evil. I guess I am not into the whole brooding cyberpunk dystopia thing.”

— Daniel H. Wilson

“All of my work has been about ideas of utopia and dystopia. I think that's what gives America interest. It's many things all at once. It's such a complicated society.”

— Joel Sternfeld

“We're creating a dystopia, where the mania of the state isn't secrecy or censorship but unfairness. Obsessed with success and wealth and despising failure and poverty, our society is systematically dividing the population into winners and losers, using institutions like the courts to speed the process. Winners get rich and get off. Losers go broke and go to jail. It isn't just that some clever crook on Wall Street can steal a billion dollars and never see the inside of a courtroom; it's that, plus the fact that some black teenager a few miles away can go to jail just for standing on a street corner, that makes the whole picture complete.”

— Matt Taibbi

“When we talk about dystopias, especially in young adult fiction, a lot of them are essentially science fictional futures. They aren't necessarily tied to the traditional concept of dystopia. And so in that space, my impression is that kids love reading about weird, wild, adventurous places, and dystopia fits that bill.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

“Bad movies: they can be tatty classics of crazed ineptitude, like Edward D. Wood's 'Glen or Glenda' and 'Plan 9 from Outer Space,' or big-budget misfires like the 1987 'Ishtar,' a would-be comedy that sent Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman on a Hope-Crosby Road to Dystopia.”

— Richard Corliss

“'Divergent,' directed by Neil Burger, displayed an admirable seriousness and some grim verve in laying out the boundaries of novelist Veronica Roth's dystopia - six segregated but ostensibly harmonious regions defined by their inhabitants' skills.”

— Richard Corliss

“I've spent the last fifteen years of my life railing against the game of soccer, an exercise that has been lauded as "the sport of the future" since 1977. Thankfully, that future dystopia has never come.”

— Chuck Klosterman

“His style as a writer places him in the category of the immortals, and his courage as a critic outlives the bitter battles in which he engaged. As a result, we use the word 'Orwellian' in two senses: The first describes a nightmare state, a dystopia of untrammelled power; the second describes the human qualities that are always ranged in resistance to such regimes, and that may be more potent and durable than we sometimes dare to think.”

— Christopher Hitchens