Since the year 2010, I've felt like I live in the future. Strangely, 2000 and 2001 didn't have quite the same effect. Regardless, we do live in the future so it's time to accept that ASCII has been superseded. This originally came from this blog post. 

(setq locale-coding-system 'utf-8)
(set-terminal-coding-system 'utf-8)
(set-keyboard-coding-system 'utf-8)
(set-selection-coding-system 'utf-8)
(prefer-coding-system 'utf-8)
(when (display-graphic-p)
  (setq x-select-request-type '(UTF8_STRING COMPOUND_TEXT TEXT STRING)))

With that done, it's time to use C-x 8 RET 0950 to test our settings with a Unicode code point that looks similar to the Emacs logo: ॐ.