Quotes About Idealism

Whenever people in that part of the world asked Patterson about the wonders of America, the possibilities and the hope of America, Patterson would say that it was a good and fine place but all the Americans were running it into the ground and that it would be a far better place if it had no Americans.

There is this way that I felt when I was younger that we were beyond history and we were all citizens of the world that now seems so naive.

One who enjoys own luxurious lifestyle by being idle but bumptiously loves to preach others about the importance of hard work through lengthy, empty speech publicly, is the most ideal person to be in politics.

Somewhere, what with all these clouds, and all this air,There must be a rare name, somewhere… How do you like "Cloud-Cuckoo-Land"?

Americans admire a people who can scratch a desert and produce a garden. The Israelis have shown qualities that Americans identify with: guts, patriotism, idealism, a passion for freedom. I have seen it. I know. I believe that.

An idealist is ahead of his time only in the sense that he is articulate. The same is true of a nation. For even primitive people, even effete races have a message for those above or below them. The heritage of the Ideal, however small can not be exhausted.

I see my shows like Gandhi, and I've got little baby Gandhis, and they are changing the world. I know that I'm a bit delusional about that, but I do think of them like Gandhi. They are not celebrities: they are like Gandhi and Mother Teresa.

I'm like a little Pollyanna. I look at the world with rose-colored glasses.

The '60s are gone, dope will never be as cheap, sex never as free, and the rock and roll never as great.

My formula for human greatness is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not in the future, not in the past, not for all eternity. Not only to endure what is necessary, still less to conceal it — all idealism is falseness in the face of necessity — , but to love it...

I fear that, with our current veneration for the natural and the real, we have arrived at the opposite pole to all idealism, and have landed in the region of the waxworks.

The disappointed man speaks.—I sought great human beings, I never found anything but the apes of their ideal.

Only the boldest Utopians would dream of the economy of kindness.

For a lot of people, Superman is and has always been America's hero. He stands for what we believe is the best within us: limitless strength tempered by compassion, that can bear adversity and emerge stronger on the other side. He stands for what we all feel we would like to be able to stand for, when standing is hardest.

Welcome to Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.

John Kerry wants to be the hero in his own drama. He likes King Arthur and the Round Table. He likes the young swashbuckling Churchill, and he loved the early antics of Theodore Roosevelt.

Politics is not a game for naive thinkers. You may go in as an idealist, but you certainly won't come out as one.

America, to me, is this enormous contrast between the heady idealism of founding fathers such as Thomas Jefferson, who said, 'All men are created equal,' and the reality that he was himself a slave owner.

Death preserves an ideal.

A young man with an untrimmed beard and rebellious eyes looked like a conscientious objector to everything.

The goals of instrumental evil are generally acceptable ones, such as the desire to have money or power, but they are not normally endowed with sufficient moral force to make people think that it is right and good to use violent means. Idealism can make the methods seem right and good, or at least acceptable.

The young habitually mistake lust for love, they're infested with idealism of all kinds.

Of course you have always been an idealist, and filled with your optimistic dreams; but reality must at some time obtrude, and you are now turned thirty.

Stupid, stupid, stupid: I'd believed all that claptrap about life, liberty, democracy, and the rights of the individual I'd soaked up at law school. These were eternal verities and we would always defend them. I'd depended on that, as if on a magic charm.