Quotes About Idealism

when you were young and your heart was an open book you used to say live and let live.

idealism, however sabotaged by untidy reality, is a fundamental human value that separates us from the animal realm.

I am an idealist. I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way.

They suffered from the terrible delusion that something could be done. They seemed prepared to make the world the way they wanted it or die in the attempt, and the trouble with dying in the attempt was that you died in the attempt.

The young man is also an idealist. He has yet to find out that what's in the public interest is not what the public is interested in.

Sometimes Carrot sounded like a civics essay written by a stunned choirboy.

I got into journalism not to be a journalist but to try to change American foreign policy. I'm a corny person. I was a dreamer predating my journalistic life, so I got into journalism as a means to try to change the world.

Justice is to be found only in imagination.

Robert Kennedy was such an inspiring figure. His interest in politics seemed to come not from a desire for power, but from a need to help our society live up to its ideals.

The energy of the Kennedy years was completely compelling... I had a sense of a generous society eager to change the world. Idealism was very contagious. So that's why I went to America. I didn't intend to stay.

I came to political consciousness with John F. Kennedy's magnificent 1961 Inaugural Address. It seemed the start of something fresh and exciting, and it was.

I guess I kind of lived in a fairytale world... looking at everything through rose-colored glasses. I probably always will, to a certain extent.

I realized I was still caught between two worlds. I missed the idealism and even the redundancy of home, the little routines of my father's, like throwing his keys in the air, and the way my mom's smile could make the whole world forget its worries...

The attempt to make heaven on earth invariably produces hell.

Do you ever think you're being an idealist? Do you ever wonder if you're holding out for something that doesn't exist? I'm not being pessimistic, and although I'd like to believe that a boom or we or us exists, I'm not sure I do anymore. Maybe I've been holding out for something that's unrealistic.

Freedom is our strength but comes with responsibility, went my thinking; it had to be tended and fed, or some such lofty idealism in a schoolgirl's musing.

I love that world more, I think, because it is perfectible. Because I have perfected it. The actual world is the random garbage fire it always is. There's not a goddamn thing I can do about the actual world's code.

Daddy used to say that calling a person a romantic was just another way of saying he or she acted without regard for conseqences.

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

That's the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.

Timothy supposed this was what you got when you crossed youthful idealism with anger and a sense of futility. And weed.

The great challenge of adulthood is holding on to your idealism after you lose your innocence.

Presently we began to have our slices of the national cake," F. Scott Fitzgerald remembered, "and our idealism only flared up when the newspapers made melodrama out of such stories as Harding and the Ohio Gang or Sacco and Vanzetti.

But the bullet that killed Herbert Lee set off a string of firecrackers that clustered in a single summer, a season so radically different, so idealistic, so savage, so daring, that it redefined freedom in America.