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. This is the case even with a great writer like Swift, who can flay a bishop or a politician so neatly, but who, when he tries to create a superman, merely leaves one with the impression the very last he can have intended that the stinking Yahoos had in them more possibility of development than the enlightened Houyhnhnms.

From "Why Socialists Don't Believe in Fun"