Quotes About Idealism

Many of those who survived are still paying for it. To me the way they were used, particularly the way their idealism and loyalty were exploited by leaders who themselves had lost faith in the effort, is a stunning betrayal. It is a lasting American tragedy and disgrace.

Innocence is a better world.

He started with interests of a genuinely scientific and humane kind – full of idealism, you know – then gradually involved himself with all sorts of mystical nonsense, transcendental magic, goodness knows what rubbish. Made quite a good thing out of it, I believe. Contributions from the Faithful, women especially. Human beings are sad dupes, I fear. The priesthood would have a thin time of it were that not so.

Young people] are high-minded because they have not yet been humbled by life, nor have they experienced the force of circumstances. … They think they know everything, and are always quite sure about it. Rhetoric, fourth century BCE (BC)

If the poet's description be criticized as not true to fact, one may urge perhaps that the object ought to be as described—an answer like that of Sophocles, who said that he drew men as they ought to be, and Euripides as they were.

The mind is not forced to believe in the existence of anything (subjectivism, absolute idealism, solipsism, skepticism: c.f. the Upanishads, the Taoists and Plato, who, all of them, adopt this philosophical attitude by way of purification). That is why the only organ of contact with existence is acceptance, love. That is why beauty and reality are identical. That is why joy and the sense of reality are identical.

Author sees the congested idealism of the generally discontent as reservoir that will support centralized power even while disagreeing with many specific provisions.

Like every thoughtful parent in every age of history, Neil consoled himself, My generation failed, but this new one is going to change the entire world, and go piously to the polls even on rainy election-days, and never drink more than one cocktail, and end all war.

Blessed be they who are not Patriots and Idealists, and who do not feel they must dash right in and Do Something About It, something so immediately important that all doubters must be liquidated—tortured—slaughtered! Good old murder, that since the slaying of Abel by Cain has always been the new device by which all oligarchies and dictators have, for all future ages to come, removed opposition!

Is it just possible,' he sighed, 'that the most vigorous and boldest idealists have been the worst enemies of human progress instead of its greatest creators?

Probably no one alive hasn't at one time or another brooded over the possibility of going back to an earlier, ideal age in his existence and living a different kind of life.

My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular.

To prove that something exists means to prove that it is not something that exists only in thought." This is perfectly true, but it means that the unity of thinking and being does not and cannot in any way mean their identity. This is one of the most important features distinguishing materialism from idealism.

Youth is ignorant, and its passion is abstract.

An den Verheißungen der Utopie scheint alles bewundernswert und ist alles falsch; an den Feststellungen der Reaktionäre ist alles verabscheuenswert und scheint alles wahr.

Idealists of all schools, aristocrats and bourgeois, theologians and metaphysicians, politicians and moralists, religionists, philosophers, or poets, not forgetting the liberal economists—unbounded worshippers of the ideal, as we know—are much offended when told that man, with his magnificent intelligence, his sublime ideas, and his boundless aspirations, is, like all else existing in the world, nothing but matter, only a product of vile matter.

What the people want is very simple - they want an America as good as its promise.

Mankind's tragedy is that he can draw up blueprints for a better life but he cannot live up to them.

A reformer exhorted children that they would succeed where he and his colleagues had failed with the charge: "Live for that better day.

His solution, beautiful and unattainable, was philosopher-kings.

Truly it would be well if these visionaries, who think so much of themselves and so little of mankind, who want to renew everything, would only be content with trying to reform themselves, the task would be arduous enough for them.

The age is mad and talks nonsense in all areas, but above all where art is concerned, because of the heretical confusion between good and beauty. Everyone who seeks the pure ideal where art is concerned is regarded as a heretic in the eyes of the Muse and of art. So I'll speak of the idealist painters as if they were ill; sometimes they reveal genius, but it is a genius that is ailing.

All the choir of heaven and furniture of earth - in a word, all those bodies which compose the frame of the world - have not any subsistence without a mind.

When you're younger, you're going to be cast as the heroic, earnest leading man.