We Dystopian Unfreedom Quotes

Beauty? Why is the dance beautiful? Answer: Because this is a non-free movement, because the whole deep meaning of dance is in absolute, aesthetic subordination, ideal unfreedom. ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

Through my fiction, I seek to highlight the social and cultural rules that we accept without question. Sometimes, without even noticing. Fiction offers a unique platform to do this, with dystopia at the fore. By exaggerating these ingrained rules, or by reversing them entirely, we can start to examine them. And question them. And challenge those that are harmful. ~ Angeline Trevena

The geographer and politician Edwin Brooks argued more than 40 years ago that what we had to avoid was a dystopian future of a 'crowded glowering planet of massive inequalities of wealth buttressed by stark force and endlessly threatened by desperate men in the global ghettoes'.2 These ~ Paul Rogers

Someday all the wilds will be razed, and we will be left with a concrete landscape, a land of pretty houses and trim gardens and planned parks and forests, and a world that works as smoothly as a clock, neatly wound: a world of metal and gears, and people going tick-tick-tick to their deaths. ~ Lauren Oliver

If we keep punishing people for what their parents or their ancestors have done, the world as a whole can never move forward. Society will never grow. ~ Jennifer Wilson

What we are probably given is a mixture of truth and untruth. It's anybody's guess as to which part is which and how much there is of each. ~ Ira Levin

Human reason can excuse any evil; that is why it's so important that we don't rely on it. ~ Veronica Roth

What I always hate is when people call our movement a 'revolution'. For this to be a revolution, we would have to be opposing a standing government. Look around; there is no standing government. ~ Joe Reyes

Without the Dreamscape, we can't sleep.
My parents remind me all the time about stories their parents told them, of how things were in the Manic Age. The time before our bodies were upgraded to sync with the amazing invention called the Dreamscape. Thirty-eight years ago, people actually had to fall asleep on their own and, sometimes, they would toss and turn for hours. My grandparents said when sleep, in its mercy, did come, it often brought with it horrible images I've heard people used to call nightmares. ~ Shannon Duffy

This virus will leave us entirely newborn people. We will all be different, none of us will ever be the same again. We will have deeper roots, be made of denser soil, and our eyes will have seen things. ~ C. JoyBell C.

I plant a gentle parting kiss on his lips, our strategy is well and truly screwed at this stage anyway. We barely lasted a day. ~ Siobhan Davis

Surrounded by what was once everything we could ever need, we now saw just how little we all possessed.

--Bil Carlson's thoughts ~ E.A. Lake

We are gathered here to send our gratitude to Pinnacle Officer Wilcox
and FERTS, for our daily provision and protection from those who would seek to strike against our Vassals, our Fighters and our Internees. ~ Grace Hudson

We go to the schools and they leach the dreams from where our ancestors hid them, in the honeycombs of slushy marrow buried in our bones. And us? Well, we join our ancestors, hoping we left enough dreams behind for the next generation to stumble across. ~ Cherie Dimaline

Loyalty is the key to our survival. Without it, we are just like them. ~ Tiana Dalichov

IT IS SAID that time is unrelated to everything else. It goes on and on, unnoticing of our actions, our falls, our triumphs. Who's to care then, if time does not remember us? It flies by, fleeting, inattentive and disinterested in any occupants of this earth. What are we, then, if time thinks so little of everyone it passes? Time is truly apathetic to the many to whom a little empathy would mean so much.
~April~
Disarming Reign of Blood ~ Alexia Purdy

And tomorrow... what? Nobody knows. You understand? Neither I nor anyone else knows. It's unknown. You understand it's come to an end, everything that was known? Now it'll be new, never before seen or imagined. ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

Sometimes when we label something dystopian fiction, I feel like we're trying very hard not to use the words 'science fiction,' because science fiction has those horrible connotations of rocket ships and bodacious babes. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

I might not have believed this if a Human had said it. Humans said one thing with their bodies and another with their mouths and everyone had to spend time and energy figuring out what they really meant. And once we did understand them, the Humans got angry and acted as though we had stolen thoughts from their minds. ~ Octavia E. Butler

That's one of our speculations, by the way. That the prior version of history that this one overwrote was horrible. Complete geopolitical mayhem; half of New York City is underwater. The United States is headed toward civil war, or ruled by an artificial-intelligence construct, or some such other thing. Real end-of-days stuff. That the instances of ourselves who existed in that history figured out what we have: that the invention of the causality violation device was the cause. That in that prior version of history, Rebecca did not die in a car accident. That she went back to the past on a mission, as a volunteer, well aware of her sacrifice. ~ Dexter Palmer

He takes my face in his hands and presses his lips against mine – a tender, beautiful kiss – the kiss I've waited for forever. He quickly pulls his shirt over his head and my breath catches in my throat at the sight of his muscular body and smooth skin. He pushes Ordinary gently to the bottom of the bunk and climbs in next to me. Wrapping his arms around me, he lays his head next to mine. At last, we sleep.' ...from Notes on a Rebellion ~ Valentina Hepburn

All we've ever wanted was to live in peace," said Fulvio, "you'd think we were asking for the moon."
"You gonna lasso the moon?"
"Someday my friend. Someday... ~ Cathrina Constantine

Would we be so enamored with dystopian fiction if we lived in a culture where violent death was a major concern? It wouldn't be escapism. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

We have survived the death of our childhood. We are soldiers now, maybe the last soldiers who will ever fight, the Earth's final and only hope, united as one in the spirit of vengeance. ~ Rick Yancey

Sometimes at night I would look out and up at the glow rising up around me through the plastic and it would just make me shudder. It reminded me of larvae. We were like pale grubs in our eggs. When I got the horrors like that, I requested a little yellow pill from the dial-a-doc and flopped down into the fuzz along with everyone else. ~ Stevie O'Connor

Little in his brief life was lost on him; there are premonitions of Nineteen Eighty-Four even in his memoir of schooldays 'Such, Such Were the Joys'. Experiences in the colonies and the BBC can be seen to have furnished raw materials; so indeed can his reading of Evgeny Zamyatin's We and other dystopian literature from the early days of Stalinism. But the transcendent or crystallising moment undoubtedly occurred in Spain, or at any rate in Catalonia. This was where Orwell suffered the premonitory pangs of a man living under a police regime: a police regime ruling in the name of socialism and the people. For a Westerner, at least, this epiphany was a relatively novel thing; it brushed the sleeves of many thoughtful and humane people, who barely allowed it to interrupt their preoccupation with the 'main enemy', fascism. But on Orwell it made a permanent impression. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Money is a tool we use to reach certain ends. Nothing more, nothing less. It's hard to come by, though, so when opportunities arise, we need to make the most of them. ~ Michael Monroe

My dogs might believe, in their little doggy brains, that they wield the power in our relationship because I feed them, pet them, come when they bark, pick up their poop, buy them toys and care for them when they are sick. However, if they ever decided to act on their beliefs and try to exert power over me or my family, then their true place in the relationship would quickly become apparent. Likewise, we may feel confident that we are the master of our AI creations, only to be taken completely by surprise when we realise – too late – that we are no longer in control. ~ Sean A. Culey

We are a species born from the planet. If the machines truly want to protect the Earth type planets they must learn to take care of us too.- Sun Wukong ~ Carolina Cody Aldaz

THE ELITES AND THE LESSERS, ONE LOOKS DOWN UPON THE OTHER.
IF YOU'RE A ROAMER, YOU'RE NO LONGER PART OF THE ELITES.
BECOMING A NEW-LESSER MAY SAVE YOU. IF ONLY FOR A LITTLE WHILE.
THREE ISLANDS TWO COLLIDE THE THIRD IS A MYSTERY. ~ Charon Lloyd-Roberts

unearthing some of the most disturbing moments in Austrian history. He had made a sort of subspecialty of studying intellectuals persecuted in the pre-Nazi era, and we discussed his fascinating work on the assassination of Hugo Bettauer, the writer and editor whose dystopian 1923 novel, Die Stadt Ohne Juden (The City Without Jews), remains one of the most uncanny predictions of a historic catastrophe ever written. ~ Tom Reiss

... I'm afraid of what the digital age will do to the world, to the things we think are important ... it's almost like people want to believe in some illusion that they're robots and forget altogether that they're real, living people ... but everything these days is disposable, even people themselves, and that's why I'm afraid for the world," Mandy confessed, looking depressed and worried.
"So am I ... but I'll still watch all of it as the world dooms itself, because I want to see how it ends, and whether or not they'll be intelligent enough to forget all of this digital illusion afterwards," Alecto explained. "I'm sure that they'll be able to realize how wrong it all is ... even though the idiots outnumber most people these days, there are still enough intelligent people to fight against it. ~ Rebecca McNutt

Why you?"

"I don't know, ask him."

"I'm asking you, so, why don't you just come out and say it?"

Rafe released the door, letting it close. "What are we talking about?"

I dug my nails into my palms, letting the pain brace me for his answer. "Is he your father?"

Rafe's smile returned. "Nope. I'm not your brother, Lane. I know that's got to be a disappointment." He paused, considering it. "Or maybe not. Now you can throw yourself at me. Just not when Mack's around okay? He's not my dad, but he is the guy who busted me out of an orphan camp when I was ten. ~ Kat Falls

I think people respond to dystopian stories because they're ways of acting out anxieties that we have and fears that we have about the future. So much media's coming at you over the Internet, your brain gets overloaded. You don't know what to do with it. And one thing you can do with it is read a story. ~ Suzanne Collins

The world as we know it, cruel, dark and hopeless, have gifted us one more reason why, as a species, shoud we accept the fact that we're living in absolute ignorance. One more chunk of food for our fears and desperations. One more nightmarish and haunting thought for our dreams. ~ Mladen Đorđević

They wept for humanity, those two, not for themselves. They could not bear that this should be the end. Ere silence was completed their hearts were opened, and they knew what had been important on the earth. Man, the flower of all flesh, the noblest of all creatures visible, man who had once made god in his image, and had mirrored his strength on the constellations, beautiful naked man was dying, strangled in the garments that he had woven. Century after century had he toiled, and here was his reward. Truly the garment had seemed heavenly at first, shot with colours of culture, sewn with the threads of self-denial. And heavenly it had been so long as man could shed it at will and live by the essence that is his soul, and the essence, equally divine, that is his body. The sin against the body - it was for that they wept in chief; the centuries of wrong against the muscles and the nerves, and those five portals by which we can alone apprehend - glozing it over with talk of evolution, until the body was white pap, the home of ideas as colourless, last sloshy stirrings of a spirit that had grasped the stars. ~ E.M. Forster

If you listen closely you will hear the spirits sigh
a lesson lost on humans; an enchanting lullaby:
Mercy lies in nature's hands and bound to it we grow.
Of the earth we came to be and of the earth we'll go. ~ Nicoline Evans