But if you'd only ever lived in small wooden house in the middle of wilderness, it sounded much better. Especially because it… — Christine Jennings Community Copy Share Image
Some people think God is going to guide those humans. The Oneida community and the Shakers both believed that they had received… — Christine Jennings Bible Copy Share Image
That to me was one of the most exciting, and weird puzzles of this book: how are the most religious people and… — Christine Jennings Book Copy Share Image
The secular utopians basically said the exact same thing, they just took the Bible out of the equation. The religious and the… — Christine Jennings Bible Copy Share Image
The religious and irreligious are agreeing with each other almost all the time. Their rhetoric is the same, and their plans are… — Christine Jennings Agreeing Copy Share Image
They're people who probably imagine that they would have had a better time in the past. I wouldn't imagine you'd encounter a… — Christine Jennings America Copy Share Image
Some people just think utopians are idiots who are imagining rivers of candy and not really engaging with the world's ills, and… — Christine Jennings Affair Copy Share Image
Utopian fiction is really boring. I had to read a lot of it, and it's not that much fun. But they're fascinating… — Christine Jennings Book Copy Share Image
The fatal flaw of most utopian visions is that they're fundamentally static, and that's not a comfortable place for humans to live.… — Christine Jennings Appeals Copy Share Image
The vision shared by both [French utopian] Charles Fourier and Robert Owen was for an entire town to fit into one structure.… — Christine Jennings Architecture Copy Share Image
One of the things that's amazing about reading the private writing of these folks is that they enthusiastically describe things which we… — Christine Jennings Architecture Copy Share Image
Utopians don't say, 'The world's corrupt, women make less money, people of color are oppressed at every turn.' You don't list the… — Christine Jennings Be good Copy Share Image
Because the utopian's worldview was framed around moving toward this perfected future, it helped stimulate the private exertions that add up to… — Christine Jennings Add Copy Share Image
The Jacksonian era is generally talked about in terms of individualism, and the development of free market capitalism, and Victorian prudery. It… — Christine Jennings Bunch Copy Share Image
They [Oneida people] didn't want to fix problems one at a time. If someone invited them to a feminist convention, their answer… — Christine Jennings Answers Copy Share Image
I was really interested in 20th century communalism and alternative communities, the boom of communes in the 60s and 70s. That led… — Christine Jennings 19th century Copy Share Image
don't think I should be in the business of making big pronouncements about where we are now, but I would say that… — Christine Jennings Bigs Copy Share Image
The thing that had fueled these utopian communities was a literal belief, and not just a general sense of optimism, that the… — Christine Jennings Belief Copy Share Image
The thought was, 'We're going to go to California, where the soil is black and ten feet deep, and there are no… — Christine Jennings Black Copy Share Image
Atheist isn't really the right word because they tended to believe in some sort of Enlightenment, capital 'N' Nature kind of god.… — Christine Jennings Atheist Copy Share Image
There are two instances I studied in which a community moved, amazingly, into an preexisting village built by other, earlier communalists. The… — Christine Jennings Built Copy Share Image
These weren't college kids on acid. They were preachers, and bankers, and farmers, and the salt of American society subscribing to ideas… — Christine Jennings Acid Copy Share Image
I worry that I may have overstated the impact of Civil War on the utopians. By the time the Civil War comes,… — Christine Jennings American society Copy Share Image
The biggest names in the Transcendentalist literary circle visited the community regularly, and supported it, but they couldn't live there happily. Hawthorne… — Christine Jennings Arguing Copy Share Image
So there's that change of general consciousness, and then there's this boom after the war, this expansion into the West. It was… — Christine Jennings American economy Copy Share Image
The Oneida Perfectionists, along with some of the others, believed that feminism, and abolitionism, and other causes that they pursued in their… — Christine Jennings Causes Copy Share Image
They [Rappites] were moving from Southern Indiana to Pennsylvania, where they had originally settled when they came from Germany. They were looking… — Christine Jennings Appropriate Copy Share Image
The Enlightenment faith that things are getting a little bit better each decade becomes difficult to support. People recognized that there had… — Christine Jennings Bits Copy Share Image
Margaret Fuller was already a celebrity, travelling around the world. Emerson, who was the axis around which that whole community turned, just… — Christine Jennings Around the world Copy Share Image
There are Harvard grads, free thinkers, feminists, abolitionists, well-to-do people who want to go write poetry and live on a farm and… — Christine Jennings 20th century Copy Share Image
![“Utopian fiction is really boring. I had to read a lot of it, and it's not that much fun. But they're fascinating to me as historical documents. Cabet [Icaria's founder and author of the utopian novel, Travels in Icaria], is writing in the 1830s, and his idea of the perfect society reveals a lot…” quote by Christine Jennings](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/ac0/christine-jennings-20527_book_utopian-fiction-is-really-boring-i-had-t_68118.jpg)
![“The vision shared by both [French utopian] Charles Fourier and Robert Owen was for an entire town to fit into one structure. Owen's design for what he called a "parallelogram" was essentially to have a whole city in one building, laid out around a huge quadrangle. Fourier's scheme was to build a…” quote by Christine Jennings](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/474/christine-jennings-20527_architecture_the-vision-shared-by-both-french-utopian_2339372.jpg)
![“They [Oneida people] didn't want to fix problems one at a time. If someone invited them to a feminist convention, their answer would have been, 'In the new world women will have total equality, so lets spend our energy creating that whole new world.' And to their credit, the women at Oneida…” quote by Christine Jennings](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/a98/christine-jennings-20527_answers_they-oneida-people-didn-t-want-to-fix-pr_1079802.jpg)
![“The biggest names in the Transcendentalist literary circle visited the community regularly, and supported it, but they couldn't live there happily. Hawthorne [who was briefly a resident] left for reasons I'm sure make sense to you; he couldn't get enough writing done in a house full of people…” quote by Christine Jennings](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/603/christine-jennings-20527_arguing_the-biggest-names-in-the-transcendentali_2253748.jpg)
![“They [Rappites] were moving from Southern Indiana to Pennsylvania, where they had originally settled when they came from Germany. They were looking for someone who wanted to buy a pre-built town, which wouldn't have been appropriate for any kind of normal settlement. That's when Robert Owen [Welsh…” quote by Christine Jennings](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/d50/christine-jennings-20527_appropriate_they-rappites-were-moving-from-southern_2693393.jpg)
