“We used to pay too little attention to utopias, or even disregard them altogether, saying with regret they were impossible of realisation. Now indeed they seem to be able to be brought about far more easily than we supposed, and we are actually faced by an agonising problem of quite another kind: how can we prevent their final realisation? … Utopias are more realisable than those 'realist politics' that are only the carefully calculated policies of office-holders, and towards utopias we are moving. But it is possible that a new age is already beginning, in which cultured and intelligent people will dream of ways to avoid ideal states and to get back to a society that is less 'perfect' and more free.”

—  Nikolai Berdyaev

Source: The End of Our Time (1919), pp. 187-188. Aldous Huxley used this passage (in French translation) as the epigraph to Brave New World.

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Nikolai Berdyaev 33
Russian philosopher 1874–1948

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