15 timeless observations from history’s greatest dystopian novels
The dystopian novel has a long and dark history. It began in 1726 with Jonathan Swift’s satire Gulliver’s Travels. It has undergone numerous transformations over the last three centuries. These books share a common trait because they force readers to think about the societies they inhabit.
These novels evolve as a response to fictional utopian concerns and the ominous politics of the writer’s time. The dystopian novel uses a make-believe guise to critique the ideologies that forged them. They include enduring wisdom relevant to contemporary readers. Here are 15 timeless insights from history’s greatest dystopias.
Classic dystopian insights
1984 — George Orwell
“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”
Fahrenheit 451 — Ray Bradbury
“Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.”
The Dispossessed — Ursula K. Le Guin
“You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”
The Trial — Franz Kafka
“It’s only because of their stupidity that they’re able to be so sure of themselves.”
The Time Machine — H.G. Wells
“Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no need of change.”
Brave New World — Aldous Huxley
“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly. They’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
A Canticle for Leibowitz — Walter M. Miller Jr.
“To minimize suffering and to maximize security were natural and proper ends of society and Caesar. But then they became the only ends, somehow, and the only basis of law. This was a perversion. Inevitably, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security.”
The Handmaid’s Tale — Margaret Atwood
“Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”
Neuromancer — William Gibson
“The future is already here. It’s just unevenly distributed.”
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — Philip K. Dick
“You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation. This is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.”
We — Yevgeny Zamyatin
“A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don’t know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn’t be worth reading.”
The Road — Cormac McCarthy
“There is no God and we are his prophets.”
The Chrysalids — John Wyndham
“The essential quality of life is living. The essential quality of living is change. Change is evolution and we are part of it.”
Cat’s Cradle — Kurt Vonnegut
“Americans are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier.”
Awesome post, thanks for putting this up. Those are a lot of great classics with lessons that are timeless, if one is willing to be open to them.
You forgot “The Iron HeeL’
and the person with red-green color blindness was like “both have trees?”
they also fail at apples to apples
Great Quotes. Especially love the Philip K Dick one. Although I would say that half of these are not really dystopias. The engineered world in The Dispossesed is supposed to be a Utopia (an ‘ambiguous’ one, but still better than the capitalist/statist world it opposes) and The Road, The Chrysalids and Cats Cradle don’t really have much in the way of civilisation at all, let alone a failed attempt at rigidly planned utopia. Still, good stuff.
Dystopias and utopias never exist exclusively from one another, so any place that is a dystopia is also a utopia, and any place that is a utopia is also a dystopia. Therefore, whether any given place is perceived as one or the other depends on the individual’s perspective, and specifically on whether he has conditioned himself to see only the good components or only the bad components of his surroundings.
It does not matter whether the living condition is seemingly joyous or abysmal, because the true, harmful essence of duality is lack of freedom of choice. So whether a place is perceived as a utopia for its comfortable merits (eg. Brave New World), or perceived as a dystopia for its authoritarian regime (eg. 1984), a lack of freedom of choice still runs through the place regardless, and is the sole element which robs human beings of their humanity.
As Anthony Burgess put it in A Clockwork Orange, “When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.”
15?…………. nope! More like 4!!!
These really do make you think ..thank u for sharing them
Scary how accurate these are.