Quote of the Day (Will Durant, Arguing Against Utopias and Nationalism)

“In the end we must steel ourselves against utopias and be content, as Aristotle recommended, with a slightly better state. We must not expect the world to improve much faster than ourselves. Perhaps, if we can broaden our borders with intelligent study, impartial histories, modest travel, and honest thought — if we can become conscious of the needs and views and hopes of other peoples, and sensitive to the diverse values and beauties of diverse cultures and lands, we shall not so readily plunge into competitive homicide, but shall find room in our hearts for a wider understanding and an almost universal sympathy. We shall find in all nations qualities and accomplishments from which we may learn and refresh ourselves, and by which we may enrich our inheritance and our posterity. Someday, let us hope, it will be permitted us to love our country without betraying mankind.” — Pulitzer Prize-winning American philosopher and historian Will Durant (1885-1981), Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God (2014)

Quote of the Day (Martin Amis, on How Utopia Becomes Dystopia)

“Every imagined Utopia, from Plato to the present day, helplessly becomes a Dystopia, almost certainly because the writers just couldn’t resist the urge to make the ‘place’ sound halfway interesting. Otherwise the Perfect Society is perfectly inhuman and perfectly inane. What would you do all day in Utopia? And who now would turn to a map of the world in a vain quest for the wastelands called Never Has Been, Never Could Be and Never Should Be?”—English novelist-essayist Martin Amis, “The Deadliest Idealism,” in The New York Times Book Review, Oct. 22, 2017,  collected in The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage,1994-2017 (2018)

(Photo of Martin Amis taken at the 2014 Texas Book Festival, Austin, Texas, by Larry D. Moore.)