"We are all dreamers creating the next world, the next beautiful world for ourselves and for our children"
About this Quote
Yoko Ono makes utopia sound less like a blueprint and more like a group project that never really ends. “We are all dreamers” is an invitation disguised as a claim: you don’t have to be anointed as an artist, an activist, or a genius to matter. The line flattens the hierarchy between maker and audience, a move that tracks with Ono’s conceptual art and participatory “instruction pieces,” where the work often exists only when someone else completes it in their mind or in real life. Dreaming here isn’t escapism; it’s a civic muscle.
The phrase “creating the next world” carries a quiet rebuke to the idea that the world simply happens to us. Ono’s subtext is agency: institutions and governments may dominate the present, but the future is still pliable, drafted in daily decisions, attention, and imagination. She keeps it deliberately vague - “next world,” not “better policy” - because vagueness is scalable. Anyone can step into it; no one has to pass an ideological purity test. That openness is also strategic: it sidesteps the cynic’s favorite trap, the demand for specifics that can be instantly mocked.
“Beautiful” is doing heavy lifting. It’s not the naive prettiness critics often project onto Ono; it’s a refusal to let brutality be the only realism available. The final clause, “for ourselves and for our children,” grounds the airy rhetoric in generational consequence. In the wake of war, Cold War dread, and the backlash that followed her highly visible peace messaging with John Lennon, the quote reads like persistence in soft-spoken form: imagination as a moral obligation, not a luxury.
The phrase “creating the next world” carries a quiet rebuke to the idea that the world simply happens to us. Ono’s subtext is agency: institutions and governments may dominate the present, but the future is still pliable, drafted in daily decisions, attention, and imagination. She keeps it deliberately vague - “next world,” not “better policy” - because vagueness is scalable. Anyone can step into it; no one has to pass an ideological purity test. That openness is also strategic: it sidesteps the cynic’s favorite trap, the demand for specifics that can be instantly mocked.
“Beautiful” is doing heavy lifting. It’s not the naive prettiness critics often project onto Ono; it’s a refusal to let brutality be the only realism available. The final clause, “for ourselves and for our children,” grounds the airy rhetoric in generational consequence. In the wake of war, Cold War dread, and the backlash that followed her highly visible peace messaging with John Lennon, the quote reads like persistence in soft-spoken form: imagination as a moral obligation, not a luxury.
Quote Details
| Topic | Motivational |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
More Quotes by Yoko
Add to List








