Quotes About Idealism

Jak dobrze by? mÅ'odym i mie? gorÄ…cÄ… gÅ'owÄ™! Wierzy?, ?e ciemno?? ma serce, wróg imiÄ™, a eksperymenty cel.

I am very practical, but at the same time, I am a dreamer and romantic.

There are theoretical reformers at all times, and all the world over, living on anticipation.

I love the optimism on the shores of youth, where time hasn't yet eroded faith.

'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington' is one of the greatest films of all time.

He was as he was, and she would live with him and love him until her dying day—or his—and be ever thankful for the idealist she was about to marry, the man who wanted to be perfect but was gradually learning the painful lesson that nobody was. That nothing was. Everyone and everything was in a state of becoming. That was the terror and the wonder of life.

God save us from idealists! They dream of a world without injustice, and what crime won't they commit to get it! I swear, Mirella, I'll settle for a world with good manners.

What is it in humans that makes us so eager to believe ill of one another? ... What makes us so hungry for it? Failed idealism, he suspected. We disappoint ourselves and then look around for other failures to convince ourselves: it's not just me. (15)

You are young, Father Iron Horse, and you have a young man's vices. Certainty. Shortsightedness. Contempt for pragmatism.

It [Romanticism] is concerned—in the words of Aristotle—not with things as they are, but with things as they might be and ought to be.

Frank was the fuel. He gave me, in the hours of my own days, the reality of that sense of life, which created The Fountainhead--and he helped me to maintain it over a long span of years when there was nothing around us but a gray desert of people and events that evoked nothing but contempt and revulsion. The essence of the bond between us is the fact that neither of us has ever wanted or been tempted to settle for anything less than the world presented in The Fountainhead. We never will.

The class went all right, and the ones after became easier. I was enthusiastic, naive and idealistic, and I was in love with my books.

I was the product of that young man's dreams; and as we pulled up to the makeshift holding area behind a wide stage, a part of me imagined myself not as the politician I had become but as one of those young people in the crowd, uncompromised by power, unencumbered by the need to accommodate men like Erdogan and Klaus, obliged only to make common cause with those chasing after a new and better world.

Oh, how earnest I was then—how fierce and humorless! When I look back on my journal entries from this time, I feel a great affection for the young man that I was, aching to make a mark on the world, wanting to be a part of something grand and idealistic, which evidence seemed to indicate did not exist.

I was actually doing in my life. I was like a young Walter Mitty; a Don Quixote with no Sancho Panza.

Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we work for the world as it should be?

there would always be a chasm between what I knew should be done to achieve a better world and what in a day, week, or year I found myself actually able to accomplish.

How useful is it to describe the world as it should be when efforts to achieve that world are bound to fall short?

evoked my own youthful idealism, the part of me still untouched by cynicism, cold calculation, or caution dressed up as wisdom.

I realized that for all the power inherent in the seat I now occupied, there would always be a chasm between what I knew should be done to achieve a better world and what in a day, week, or year I found myself actually able to accomplish.

Americans have always been idealists. They want their country to act for pure motives

Unfortunately, we live in a world where religion seems as likely to detonate a bomb as to defuse one. So while we need idealism, we need realism even more. We need to understand religious people as they are—not just at their best but also their worst.

We will never have a perfect world, but it's not romantic or naïve to work toward a better one.

The Crusades were an upwelling of religious idealism that were marked by a few excesses but left the world with the fruits of cultural exchange. The Crusades were a series of vicious pogroms against Jewish communities that were part of a long history of European anti-Semitism. The Crusades were a brutal invasion of Muslim lands and the start of a long history of humiliation of Islam by Christendom. •