Quotes About Idealism

Utopia is impossible; everyone who isn't a utopian is a shmuck.

They wouldn't do it. They're kids. If they understood risks, they wouldn't join uprisings and march in the streets and the world would be a simpler place. Not a better one, of course. But simpler.

Countless generations have set out convinced that they would succeed where other had failed – that's where lawyers and reporters come from, you know. They're the cynical corpses of idealistic young people who thought the system could be reformed.

Yet even so, the margin between staying and leaving was so thin. Really, it could have gone either way. Sometimes I think that my years of diligent schoolwork and political idealism had given me the erroneous notion that if one choice, one plan, was hard and the other was easy, doing the hard thing was inherently better—worthier, more upstanding.

All human beings are vines. But especially the idealist. He is a vine, and he needs to clutch and climb. And he despises the man who is a mere potato, or turnip, or lump of wood.

Most fatal, most hateful of all things is bullying. But what is bullying? It is a desire to superimpose my own will upon another person. Sensual bullying of course is fairly easily detected. What is more dangerous is ideal bullying. Bullying people into what is ideally good for them. I embrace for example an ideal, and[59] I seek to enact this ideal in the person of another. This is ideal bullying.

The true liberty will only begin when Americans discover IT, and proceed possibly to fulfill IT. IT being the deepest whole self of man, the self in its wholeness, not idealistic halfness.

J. Pierpont Morgan observed, in one of his analytical interludes, that a person usually has two reasons for doing a thing: one that sounds good and a real one. The person himself will think of the real reason. You don't need to emphasize that. But all of us, being idealists at heart, like to think of motives that sound good. So, in order to change people, appeal to the nobler motives.

he never finished any of the works he began because, so sublime was his idea of art, he saw faults even in the things that to others seemed miracles.

Jobs would complain about the new generation of kids, who seemed to him more materialistic and careerist than his own. "When I went to school,it was right after the sixties and before this general wave of practical purposefulness had set in,"he said. "Now students aren't even thinking in idealistic terms, or at least nowhere near as much.

The idealistic wind of the sixties is still at our backs, though, and most of the people I know who are my age have that ingrained in them forever.

Young lovers see a vision of the world redeemed by love. That is the truest thing they ever see, for without it life is death.

Highfalutin moral principles are impossible guides to foreign policy. At worst, they reflect hypocrisy; at best, extreme naivete.

sense of spoiled romanticism, a disappointment with the way things turned out. It was supposed to be far more beautiful and romantic and gentle, and I learned pretty early on that it wasn't going to be like that.

When I was a kid, I did everything I could to get super-powers. Why? I wanted to be a hero. I wanted to be Captain America. Sometimes I fall short.

Perhaps, like bureaucracies everywhere, government officials in Singapore are uncomfortable with groups who appeal successfully to the public's sense of idealism, and whose work cannot be easily quantified in economic terms. Officials can handle individuals and organisations who are in it for the money, but seem not to know how to deal with people who seek and promote more intangible and selfless rewards.

Sometimes people call me an idealist. Well, that is the way I know I am an American. America, my fellow citizens — I do not say it in disparagement of any other great people — America is the only idealistic Nation in the world.

An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.

An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it makes a better soup.

But most good writers are Don Quixote at heart, and unreasonableness is often a condition of art.

There are no idealists in the plant world and no compassion. The rose and the morning glory know no mercy. Bindweed, the morning glory, will quickly choke its competitors to death, and the fencerow rose will just as quietly crowd out any other plant that tried to share its roothold. Idealism and mercy are human terms and human concepts.

I am a hopeless romantic. And I won't stop till I get it right.

But cynicism is only disappointed idealism.

Manchmal denke ich – und es fällt mir schwer das zu sagen -, daß er die Menschen besser kennt als der Chef. Der Chef ist ein Idealist, ein großer Schatz, der das Beste für die Menschen will, ohne zu wissen, mit wem er es eigentlich zu tun hat. Luzifer aber weiß, daß sie lieber Himmel und Erde untergehen lassen würden, als ihr Auto abzumelden.