Quotes About Ideals

Until then he had believed they justified colonialism: Christianity, civilization, and commerce.

por los biempensantes, es

Jimmy Stewart is always and indisputably the best man in the world, unless Cary Grant should happen to show up.

As important as high aspirations and ideals are, we have to do something with them, and that takes courage. "He without an ideal is sorry indeed; he with an ideal and lacking courage to live it is sorrier still. Know that" (1402-1).

You could send in your bleeding-heart do-gooders, you could hold hands and pray and sing hootenanny songs and invoke the great gods CNN and BBC, but the only way to finally open the roads to the big-eyed babies was to show up with more guns. And in this real world, nobody had more or better guns than America. If the good-hearted ideals of humankind were to prevail, then they needed men who could make it happen.

The best of liberalism is too good to be left to the liberals

The future has many names. For the weak, it's unattainable. For the fearful, it's unknown. For the bold, it's ideal. —VICTOR HUGO To avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing. —ARISTOTLE

that we cannot even realise the idea of equality, and here in England we have been taught to hate the word by the evil effects of those absurd attempts which have been made elsewhere to proclaim it as a fact accomplished by the scratch of a pen or by a chisel on a stone. We have been injured in that, because a good word signifying a grand idea has been driven out of the vocabulary of good men. Equality would be a heaven, if we could attain it.

Ogni movimento rivoluzionario è romantico, per definizione.

Everybody on this island has one ambition, which may be summed up very simply. It is to do something, however small it may be, better than anyone else. Of course, it's an ideal we don't all achieve. But in this modern world the great thing is to have an ideal. Achieving it is considerably less important.

It was found that men become neurotic because they cannot tolerate the degree of privation that society imposes on them in virtue of its cultural ideals, and it was supposed that a return to greater possibilities of happiness would ensue if these standards were abolished or greatly relaxed.

This is perhaps the real secret of heroism. The rational basis of heroism is dependent upon the decision that one's own life cannot be worth as much as certain abstract common ideals. But I believe that instinctive or impulsive heroism is much more frequently independent of such motivation and simply defies danger on the assurance which animated Hans, the stone-cutter, a character in Anzengruber, who always said to himself: Nothing can happen to me.

Avevo torto di pretendere che la vita si conformasse a un ideale stabilito in anticipo; stava a me mostrami all'altezza di ciò ch'essa mi portava.

We cannot too strongly condemn the un-Christian attitude of certain otherwise progressive nations in their discriminations against the Jews, who have been among the strongest supporters of the League, and who will continue to prosper and to be recognized as fully Americanized, though only so long as they continue to support our ideals.

I tell you, an honest man gets sick when he hears the word 'Liberty' today, after what the Republicans did to it!

God, real people are so disappointing. I'm sure she would have done it better in the box-set version.

To my way of thinking and working, the greatest service a piece of fiction can do any reader is to force him to lay it down with a higher ideal of life than he had when he took it up.

I want to live out principles that became a part of my life in my 40s, 50s, and 60s. One principle is the universality of freedom.

I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.

Play with your ideals and laugh at the limitations of your mundane life.

T]he ideals and desires of the majority define the structure of society as it is; a would-be mass movement that pursues a different path will reliably find itself failing to attract members, while a mass movement that reshapes its message to attract a large audience will inevitably turn into a mechanism for replicating the existing order of things.

When a man forgets his ideals he may hope for happiness, but not till then.

I suppose people of our generation aren't able to die for good causes any longer. We had all that done for us, in the thirties and the forties, when we were still kids. ...There aren't any good, brave causes left. (Jimmy Porter)

The heirs of Jefferson and Madison would be the Democratic-Republicans, the heirs of Hamilton and Adams would be the Federalists. But the heirs of Washington would be all Americans.