Quotes About Ideals

Sergeant Skirata said that civvies didn't have a clue, and that it was alright for them to have lofty ideas about peace and freedom as long as they weren't the ones being shot at.

if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In

Like many others of his generation, he came to suspect that sustaining a lively and innovative economic system might place more constraints on the pursuit of equality than he had once thought.

All political ideals, that of making the people happy is perhaps the most dangerous one. It leads invariably to the attempt to impose our scale of 'higher' values upon others, in order to make them realize what seems to us of greatest importance for their happiness; in order, as it were, to save their souls. It leads to Utopianism and Romanticism. We all feel certain that everybody would be happy in the beautiful, the perfect community of our dreams.

I would live in a world of Christ-like humans, but not one full of Christians, may God forgive me.

There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong.

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.

American—a child not of old borders and ancient alliances, but of ideals and liberty.

The Founding Fathers] were not advocates for a monolithic notion of "God and Country," as promoters of a Christian America would now have us believe. They were precisely the opposite: the very prototypes, in fact, of the East Coast intellectuals we are always being warned against by today's religious right.

Whenever we force ourselves to conform to our ideals at the expense of our own satisfaction, we assure the Other's jouissance.

all clung to the hope that whenever America fell short of its ideals, young Americans could restore them.

I submit to you that if a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live. -Martin Luther King

The realities of the world seldom measure up to the sublime designs of human imagination.

All people seem to do is the best they can to get along and have a good time; and if that means keeping what they've got, they're liable to become fascists; and if it means trying to get what they need and don't have, there's a good chance of their learning the Internationale.

Os Gregos aperceberam-se das três funções à mulher: a de mãe, a de esposa e - não se entendendo o termo em sentido amesquinhante - a de concubina. Achavam eles que havia aí três diferentes tipos de mulher. Os românticos dos séculos XVIII e XIX nutriam a esperança de encontrar as três qualidades coexistentes numa só rapariga. Como é de esperar, naturalmente, não a concretizaram.

What depressed me, I think, was that McGovern was the only alternative available this time around, and I was sorry I couldn't get up for it. I agreed with everything he said, but I wished he would say a lot more—or maybe something different. Ideas? Specifics? Programs? Etc.? Well

I think I was always subconsciously driven by an attempt to restate that faith and to show where it was properly grounded, how it grew out of what a great many young men on both sides felt and believed and were brave enough to do.

What we need is a system of thought - you might even call it a religion - that can bind humans together. A system that would fit the Republic of Chad as well as the United States: a system that would supply our idealistic young people with something to believe in.

People think that young people don't care about things, but I think they do care; they just aren't super interested in conforming to what older people think are the right way to do things.

Young people have this almost romantic attachment to civil rights, liberties, emancipating people from oppression, etc. The idea that such oppression exists in this country offends me, but it's able to be pushed and sold because education in this country is so woefully incompetent and inept.

A lot of young women ask me, 'Can you go into politics and maintain your ideals?' Well, I think you can. You might not, in any one interview, tell the whole truth, but to deliberately deceive the public who've elected you is totally unacceptable.

Young women are still looking for a prince on a white charger to come over the hill or for Mr. Rochester to appear. We all pretend we're right-on feminists, but underneath that, there's still the bedrock of romance.

We try to push such crazy ideals onto young women: the Hollywood version of what they should look like, what they should do, and the kind of Prince Charming they should be looking for. We should just be proud of who we are, because we can't be anybody else. So what's the point of trying?

When you are younger and more radical, the police seem like the enemy.