Quotes About Ideals

Each society is a hero system which promises victory over evil and death.

Are we truly committed to the notion that ideals and values vary and alter in accordance with changing conditions? Should we not question such a relativistic dogma? Is not the degree of our sensitivity to the validity of the ultimate ideals and values that fluctuates rather than the ultimate ideals and values?

The laws of the Torah ask of each generation to fulfill what is within its power to fulfill. Some of its laws (for example Exodus 21:2 ff),14 do not represent ideals but compromises, realistic attempts to refine the moral condition of ancient man.

I never tire of reading Tom Paine .

he described his own ideals, the desire for fulfillment not just as a theorist but also as an experimental physicist. (In the second respect, he, of course, never matched Newton.)

Sir Archibald Bodkin (best known to history as the man who later would get James Joyce's novel Ulysses banned from publication in postwar England), thundered accusingly that "war will become impossible if all men were to have the view that war is wrong.

the greater part of our anxieties stems from an exaggerated sense of the importance of our own projects and concerns. We are tortured by our ideals and by a punishingly high-minded sense of the gravity of what we are doing.

cynics are merely idealists with unusually high standards. Through

It may be a sign that two people have stopped loving one another (or at least stopped wishing to make the effort that constitutes ninety per cent of love) when they are no longer able to spin differences into jokes. Humour lined the walls of irritation between our ideals and the reality: behind every joke, there was a warning of difference, of disappointment even, but it was a difference that had been defused - and could therefore be passed over without the need for a pogrom.

True beauty is indeed the one thing incapable of answering the expectations of an over-romantic imagination.…

falsifications may occasionally need to be committed in the service of a goal higher still than accuracy:

In politics, the people I most despise are those who have no values.

Yet there is no acceptance to be found in my heart. This death is unfair. Ignoble, and not justifiable by any measure of rationale. No battle is worth this. No ideals, no political cause, and no bounty. Being here is a mistake. Dying is a mistake. Twenty-two years has not been enough. "--Luke, a Civil War soldier

Religious ideas such as the idea of God have functioned as regulative ideals for us to aspire after: we too could become unified and capable subjects; we too could learn how to know the world and reshape our environment to meet our own needs.

The cities and mansions that people dream of are those in which they finally live.

Practice rather than preach. Make of your life an affirmation, defined by your ideals, not the negation of others. Dare to the level of your capability then go beyond to a higher level.

Ideals are like the stars: we never reach them, but like the mariners of the sea, we chart our course by them.

I regard the principle of conscription of life as a flat contradiction of all our cherished ideals of individual freedom, democratic liberty and Christian teaching.

Never give up. Don't let good ideas be buried with you. Breathe it. Dream it. Live it and relentlessly pursue your ideas and ideals. Without them you cannot achieve anything meaningful in life.

While I gave up God a long time ago, I never shook the habit of wanting to believe in something. So I replaced my creed of everlasting life with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

In ten phrases, the ten commandments express the essential of life. And these three words--liberty, equality, and fraternity--do just as much. Millions of people have died for those ideals.

Ideals are replaced by conventional goals at a certain age.

American democracy with its lofty ideals maintains its dominion because it wields the biggest military in the history of the planet, with enough firepower to destroy all of humanity—even without the use of nuclear weapons. While most of the population sits at home, taking this for granted—myself included—warriors bearing the United States flag stalk the jungles, deserts, and dangerous places of the world, doing the exact same thing I've just done. Vengeance.

the particular definition of 'merit' at a given moment expresses underlying power relations and tends, accordingly, to reflect the ideals of the groups that hold the power of cultural definition.