Quotes About Idealism

For we, too, have our ideals, even if we differ from those who have tried to establish a monopoly of idealism.

I know nobody believes in peace anymore, but what else is there to work toward? As the years have gone by, peace seems like more and more of an impossibility.

Young and enthusiastic, which often came pre-packaged with idealism. That should make them easy to manipulate.

It was realism that told Kelly he couldn't fix all the problems of the world; it was idealism that told him his inability to do so did not preclude him from addressing individual imperfections.

Leave it to a naive world-saver like you to view our love as a Sacred Cause when in actual fact all it was was some barking at the moon.

Had Ken Kesey opened Electric Kool-Aid stands on every college campus in the country, it would have made a lesser contribution than Life to the creation of that era of unprecedented foment we like to call "the sixties.

BAKUNIN:    Left to themselves, people are noble, generous, uncorrupted, they'd create a completely new kind of society if only people weren't so blind, stupid and selfish.

All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in. [Conversation with Elizabeth Farnsworth, PBS NewsHour , March 9, 1998]

Without idealism, politics is reduced to a form of social accounting, the day-to-day administration of men and things. This too is something that a conservative can survive well enough. But for the Left it is a catastrophe.

Dissent and dissidence are overwhelmingly the work of the young. It is not by chance that the men and women who initiated the French Revolution, like the reformers and planners of the New Deal and postwar Europe, were distinctly younger than those who had gone before. Rather than resign themselves, young people are more likely to look at a problem and demand that it be solved.

The writer crafts their ideal world. In my world, everyone has really long conversations or just picks apart pop culture to death and everyone talks in monologue.

There was little of the religious idealism or of the search for personal freedom that motivated the Pilgrims in 1620 and none of the search to create a "City on a Hill" that spurred the Puritans to take ships for Boston in 1630. To these financial backers, the settlement of Virginia was primarily about trade and money.

All that young-girl idealism is someone else's now.

Now that I no longer live in New York, I don't know if I could ever move back. All that young-girl idealism is someone else's now. That city I know doesn't exist anymore, and it's more alive in my head than it is when I'm there.

Utopia's value lies not in its relation to present practice but in its relation to a possible future. Its "practical" use is to overstep the immediate reality to depict a condition whose clear desirability draws us on, like a magnet.

As we know, there are lessons to be learned from history. Hope to be derived from hardships faced before. We've gone through bad times before and survived, even thrived. History has shown us the strength and durability of the human spirit, In the end, it is our idealism and our courage and our commitment to one another--what we have in common--that will save us.

Nothing was easier to shatter than the fragile shield of an idealist.

I'm an idealist. I don't know where I'm going but I'm on the way.

Only someone in his twenties can take such delirious propositions seriously. You have to be a twentysomething to believe that they can be turned into a theory of the world.

She thought the world was a good idea that had failed.

May I never wake up from the American dream.

There is a possessiveness in the idealist's attitude . . . . "You are to be like me. I will shape you, or hammer you, into the shape of my ideal. You must enjoy my pleasures. Your tastes must coincide with mind. You must have only my values. You must be restricted by my limitations

Idealists should always strive to underestimate others, as that will bring them closer to reality.

Those who seek to drag heaven down to earth are destined only to engineer a hell.