Quotes About Ideals

The environment you fashion out of your thoughts, your beliefs, your ideals, your philosophy is the only climate you will ever live in. The key is in not spending time, but in investing it.

Don't saddle me with your ideals, and spare me all your guilt. For a poet with all the answers, has never yet been built.

There are better ways we can transform this virulent hatred - by living our ideals, the Peace Corps, exchange students, teachers, exporting our music, poetry, blue jeans.

I was attracted to poetry, which is perhaps the purest of the art forms, where love is the medium of exchange and the nobility of love is considered. It's a land of higher ideals.

Politics is opposed to morality, as philosophy to naïveté.

Every political good carried to the extreme must be productive of evil.

The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie.

One of the reasons that politics lets us down is that we keep comparing it to our ideal narratives, to politics on TV or in the movies, which is tidier and better fits such structures.

In politics, purity is the enemy of victory.

We ought not to schismatize on either men or measures. Principles alone can justify that.

Policy and politics generally go contrary to principle.

People like passion in politics.

It's because I'm only interested in the big things that I'm not interested in politics.

There aren't many idealists in politics.

Blessed is he who carries within himself a God, an ideal, and obeys it.

Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so you shall become. Your vision is the promise of what you shall one day be; your ideal is the prophecy of what you shall at last unveil.

I keep my ideals because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.

People love high ideals, but they got to be about 33-percent plausible.

Every great movement needs an agitator. Every leader of spiritual ideals need a John the Baptist.

Too often privilege in Massachusetts was bolstered by class-conscious arrogance tempered only when necessary by corruption. Coolidge was not corrupt. His personal ideals were high. But he was serene in the presence of this corruptible body in Boston even though he put on the incorruptible—a quickening spirit. He played a clean game with the run of the dirty cards!

our faith has been dangerously weakened—watered down by a blind and essentially false and cruel sentimentalism.

The essence of education is, in the words of William James, to teach a person what deserves to be valued, to impart ideals as well as knowledge, to cultivate in students the ability to distinguish the true and good from their counterfeits and the wisdom to prefer the former to the latter.

All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience.

We may be personally defeated, but our principles never!