Utopia at Troynovant:
hopes of utopia in power, or dystopia;
listed by Title
  

We know that utopia and dystopia have more than subjective differences. Whether a society is good or bad, healthy or poisoned, lies not in rulers' proclamations or their fellow-travelers' praise. Hypothetical criteria for the best of societies should be analyzed; real social and individual consequences must be understood. Claims for absolute and ideal societies, purified by decree and command, are in especial need of the brightest light of history. The Perfectibility of Man is a process of individuals, not a State. Odysseus knew the song the Sirens sing; and so do we.
  

  
[The Archbishop's palace in York.]

Lord Bardolph:

For in a theme so bloody-faced as this,
Conjecture, expectation, and surmise
Of aids uncertain should not be admitted.
...

          ... who lined himself with hope,
Eating the air on promise of supply,
Flatt'ring himself with project of a power
Much smaller than the smallest of his thoughts;
And so, with great imagination
Proper to madmen, led his powers to death,
And winking leapt into destruction.

William Shakespeare
2 Henry IV, 1.3.22-24, 28-33

  
I am very much surer where I stand — where my arguments come from and where they will lead me — with regard to practical questions than with regard to ethical ones. And I have found that it is much easier to persuade people with practical arguments than with ethical arguments. This leads me to suspect that most political disagreement is rooted in questions of what is, not what should be.

I have never met a socialist who wanted the kind of society that I think socialism would produce.

David D. Friedman
"Postscript for Perfectionists"
The Machinery of Freedom
Guide to a Radical Capitalism  (1973; 1989)

  
... one of the most absurd, and from every point of view, horrifying events in the whole history of the Soviet labour camp system — the short stay in Kolyma of the Vice-President of the United States, Henry A. Wallace, with a group of advisors headed by Professor Owen Lattimore, in the summer of 1944. ...

Both Wallace and Lattimore published enthusiastic accounts. In his book, Soviet Asia Mission, Wallace tells us that the gold miners at Kolyma are 'big husky young men who came out to the Far East from European Russia'. He adds that they are 'pioneers of the machine age, builders of cities'. He was much impressed by the horrible Nikishov, who enchanted him when he 'gamboled about enjoying the wonderful air immensely'. ...

[ Nikishov was the vicious and high-living wartime head of Dalstroy, the NKVD Far Northern Construction Trust, administering a vast stretch of Soviet Russia plus its portion of the Gulag. Robert Conquest provides several more examples of stupefying gullibility, including Wallace's praise of paid overtime and free schooling in the mining camps, and the much-improved Soviet wages versus Tsarist mine workers.  — RWF ]

Wallace, whose background was of course agricultural, was taken out to the farm 23 kilometres from Magadan — normally a penal camp. He asked the well-dressed girl swineherds a polite question about their work; which caused some confusion as they were in fact NKVD office staff selected for their looks and smartness and had little knowledge of pigs. However, the interpreter saved the situation.

Robert Conquest
"A Clownish Interlude"
Kolyma
The Arctic Death Camps  (1978)