Quotes About Idealism

When we are young, revolution is the most romantic thing.

I like romanticizing romance.

I happen to be really a romantic.

When I was younger - it might be a romantic idea - I always thought I might go crazy.

I'm a romantic at heart.

I was so stupid when I was young. I thought that everyone should share my feelings and my sadness about the state of the world, the stuff you have when you are 16 and are asking if God exists.

When you dream as a little kid, you dream about storybook endings and storybook players and scenarios like that.

The Minimalists are idealist. They want to minimize themselves in favor of the ideal... But I just can't. You see, my paintings are not cool.

Scratch the surface of most cynics and you find a frustrated idealist — someone who made the mistake of converting his ideals into expectations.

To summarize: organizations are technical instruments, designed as means to definite goals. They are judged on engineering premises; they are expendable. Institutions, whether conceived as groups or practices, may be partly engineered, but they have also a "natural" dimension. They {22} are products of interaction and adaptation; they become the receptacles of group idealism; they are less readily expendable.

What one believes when one is sixteen is more powerful than any truth.

Some might have opposed the war because they were isolationists. But America's bipartisan, postwar consensus was that we had a responsibility to contain Communist aggression. In any event, the anti-war protesters liked to assume they represented a higher morality, and it would be hard to square isolationism with idealism. At best, one might call it naïve; at worst, short-sighted and selfish.

There was a time when idealistic folksingers such as myself believed that Reality TV was a programming vogue that would peak and recede, leaving only its hardiest show-offs. Instead, it has metastasized like toxic mold, filling every nook and opening new crannies.

In retrospect, I do think it's fair to say that we were overly idealistic and focused on more of the good parts of what connecting people and giving people a voice can bring.

To me, one of the best faces America has ever projected is the face of a Peace Corps volunteer. That face symbolizes this country: young, curious, brimming with idealism and hope - and a real, honest compassion.

The first time I voted, I voted for Eugene McCarthy and I knew he wouldn't win, but it felt so great to vote for him, to vote for the right guy - the one who wanted peace.

I think when you're young, being in love for the first time is like this fantasy.

the sad end he met in Afghanistan was more accurately a function of his stubborn idealism--his insistence on trying to do the right thing. In which case it wasn't a tragic flaw that brought Tillman down, but a tragic virtue.

As a young man, I was unlike McCandless in many important regards; most notably, I possessed neither his intellect nor his lofty ideals. But I believe we were similarly affected by the skewed relationships we had with out fathers. And I suspect we had a similar intensity, a similar heedlessness, a similar agitation of the soul.

McCandless conveniently overlooked the fact that London himself had spent just a single winter in the North and that he'd died by his own hand on his California estate at the age of forty, a fatuous drunk, obese and pathetic, maintaining a sedentary existence that bore scant resemblance to the ideals he espoused in print.

Well," Bush answered, "I'm worried that sometimes your idealism will get in the way of what I think is sound governance.

we hear another president, impossibly young and dashing, his breath white in the inaugural air, telling us to ask not what our country can do for us but what we can do for our country.

You can use your idealism to further your aims, if you realize that nothing is Nirvana, nothing is perfect.

She said, 'Believe it or not, I used to be idealistic.' I asked her what 'idealistic' meant. 'It means you live by what you think is right.' 'You don't do that anymore?' 'There are questions I don't ask anymore.