Idealism Quotes

1. "For at least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols"
Author: Aldous Huxley

2. "[in the]..curious way that my idealism has been mixed with my fatalism, so that I can possess the soul of a dreamer and that of a cynic at the same time......I possess a power of magic...[to] destroy the balance of a well-designed destiny with my diabolical mind....."
Author: Anaïs Nin

3. "Idealism, however impractical, gives a meaning to our existence."
Author: Anirban Bose

4. "Has Bill Clinton inspired idealism in the young, as he himself was inspired by John F. Kennedy? Or has he actually reduced their idealism? Surely part of the answer lies in Clinton's personal moral lapse with Monica Lewinsky. But more important was his sin of omission - his failure to embrace a moral cause beyond popularity."
Author: Arlie Russell Hochschild

5. "When you have both parties who will not find ways to compromise, who won't meet in the middle, you have paralysis. It's the perversion of idealism."
Author: Beau Willimon

6. "...After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world. I am strongly of the opinion that the great majority of people will always find these are the moving impulses of our life. But it is only those who do not understand our people, who believe that our national life is entirely absorbed by material motives. We make no concealment of the fact that we want wealth, but there are many other things that we want much more. We want peace and honor, and that charity which is so strong an element of all civilization. The chief ideal of the American people is idealism."
Author: Calvin Coolidge

7. "Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism."
Author: Carl Jung

8. "Down here in the deep, dark South we know and live with the real world. Candy-Land idealism is quietlly suffocated in the relentless humidity. This is the world where fist meets face. This is where the calluses on a man's hand are bigger than his conscience, and dreams get drowned in sweat and tears."
Author: Damien Echols

9. "Idealism loses to pragmatism when it comes to winning elections."
Author: Danny Strong

10. "A lot of my idealism was frustrated by the end of the '60s because of the way things went with the assassinations and the sense that the political establishment was so fixed in its ways you couldn't change anything."
Author: David Talbot

11. "There is ascension to potential that Plato couldn't conceive while prescribing idealism to conception as highest existences. With Streams, there isn't a difference between ideas and instantiations. They are both authenticated within all possibilities in Stream, within the Primal Cause as ordered. Ideas as ordered constructs in consciousness, instantiations as ordered effects. Instantiations for instance are ordered products from ideas. Ideas are ordered constructs in consciousness. And in authentication, they are the same as external effects."
Author: Dew Platt

12. "Idealism that makes no distinction between areas where our national interest lies and those from which it is remote does no good for America. The weariness of the post-Versailles, post-Korea, post-Vietnam eras is never far from the national mood."
Author: Dick Morris

13. "Let us depart instead for the fields of Dreams and wander those blue, romantic hills where stands the abandoned tower of the Supernatural, where cool mosses clothe the ruins of Idealism. Let us, in short, indulge in a little fantasy!"
Author: Eça De Queirós

14. "Even older and just as rich, the ritual of Kappa Alpha Order thrilled his soul and permeated his mind. By the end of the ceremony he was so awed, so filled with idealism, so saturated with nebulous aspirations, that he gazed with love on all his brothers…He floated down the stairs of the old Administration Building that night new born and shining, warm and secure in the midst of a group that no outside force could penetrate nor unsuspected evil ever tarnish. Porter was a Knight of Kappa Alpha Order (193)"
Author: Ferrol Sams

15. "I fear that, with our current veneration for the natural and the real, we have arrived at the opposite pole to all idealism, and have landed in the region of the waxworks."
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

16. "My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary—but love it"
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

17. "Idealism is frequently another word for self-righteousness, a disease that can only be corrected by a profound understanding power in its complete sense."
Author: George Friedman

18. "Something must be radically wrong with a culture and a civilisation when its youth begins to desert it. Youth is the natural time for revolt, for experiment, for a generous idealism that is eager for action. Any civilisation which has the wisdom of self-preservation will allow a certain margin of freedom for the expression of this youthful mood. But the plain, unpalatable fact is that in America today that margin of freedom has been reduced to the vanishing point. Rebellious youth is not wanted here. In our environment there is nothing to challenge our young men; there is no flexibility, no colour, no possibility for adventure, no chance to shape events more generously than is permitted under the rules of highly organised looting. All our institutional life combines for the common purpose of blackjacking our youth into the acceptance of the status quo; and not acceptance of it merely, but rather its glorification."
Author: Harold Edmund Stearns

19. "For we, too, have our ideals, even if we differ from those who have tried to establish a monopoly of idealism."
Author: Henry Cabot Lodge

20. "But it is well to remember that we are dealing with nations every one of which has a direct individual interest to serve, and there is grave danger in an unshared idealism."
Author: Henry Cabot Lodge

21. "The energy of the Kennedy years was completely compelling... I had a sense of a generous society eager to change the world. Idealism was very contagious. So that's why I went to America. I didn't intend to stay."
Author: Howard Stringer

22. "He had volunteered early, rather than waiting to be conscripted, for he felt a duty and an obligation to serve, and believed that ... being willing to fight for his country and the liberty it represented, would make some small difference. ... His idealism was one of the casualties of the carnage [of Verdun]."
Author: Iain Pears

23. "Idealism springs from deep feelings, but feelings are nothing without the formulated idea that keeps them whole."
Author: Jacques Barzun

24. "If you didn't have some sense of idealism, then what is there to sustain you?"
Author: James Carville

25. "1983:To my generation has now come the challenge. In the days to come we will be tested on whether we have the moral courage, the realism, the idealism, the tenacity, and the ability to sacrifice some of the current comfort to invest in the future... I believe that this generation will rise to the challenge... The experts believe that, like the Democratic Party itself, the less than forty-year-old voters are prepared to sell their souls for some security, real or illusory. They have misjudged us. Just because our political heroes were murdered does not mean that the dream does not still live, buried deep in our broken hearts."
Author: Joe Biden

26. "Koch's youthful idealism about libertarianism had largely devolved into a rationale for corporate self-interest."
Author: John Charles Chasteen

27. "All students enter law school with a certain amount of idealism and desire to serve the public, but after three years of brutal competition we care for nothing but the right job with the right firm where we can make partner in seven years and earn big bucks."
Author: John Grisham

28. "Centuries and centuries of idealism have not failed to influence reality"
Author: Jorge Luis Borges

29. "This preparatory sort of idealism is the one that, as I just suggested, Berkeley made prominent, and, after a fashion familiar. I must state it in my own way, although one in vain seeks to attain novelty in illustrating so frequently described a view."
Author: Josiah Royce

30. "I see history as really cyclical in terms of the intense idealism, and the desire to create a better life outside of societal norms."
Author: Lauren Groff

31. "Whether I am believed or not, I will repeat that Vladimir Soloviov, who held that Dostoevsky was a prophet, is wrong, and that N. K. Mikhailovsky, who calls him a cruel talent and a grubber after buried treasure, is right. Dostoevsky grubs after buried treasure no doubt about that. And, therefore, it would be more becoming in the younger generation that still marches under the flag of pious idealism if, instead of choosing him as a spiritual leader, they avoided the old sorcerer, in whom only those gifted with great shortsightedness or lack of experience in life could fail to see the dangerous man."
Author: Lev Shestov

32. "Cum au putut atâtea spirite alese sa fie atrase de o mi?care criminala e o întrebare nelalocul ei. „Spiritele alese" au fost atrase de idealismul mi?carii, idealism care, în exces, a condus pe de alta parte la o barbarie fara margini."
Author: Lucian Boia

33. "Though I myself am an atheist, I openly profess religion in the sense just mentioned, that is, a nature religion. I hate the idealism that wrenches man out of nature; I am not ashamed of my dependency on nature; I openly confess that the workings of nature affect not only my surface, my skin, my body, but also my core, my innermost being, that the air I breathe in bright weather has a salutary effect not only on my lungs but also on my mind, that the light of the sun illumines not only my eyes but also my spirit and my heart. And I do not, like a Christian, believe that such dependency is contrary to my true being or hope to be delivered from it. I know further that I am a finite moral being, that I shall one day cease to be. But I find this very natural and am therefore perfectly reconciled to the thought."
Author: Ludwig Feuerbach

34. "What is it in humans that makes us so eager to believe ill of one another? ... What makes us so hungry for it? Failed idealism, he suspected. We disappoint ourselves and then look around for other failures to convince ourselves: it's not just me. (15)"
Author: Mary Doria Russell

35. "I hope that I state your case fairly: One of my great fears is misrepresenting you, even to myself, now that you are not here to set me right. The truth is that you did not believe in idealism. All love was suspect; even a saint's was just differed self-interest. And it was impossible to argue without sounding either sentimental or naive. Cynicism has all the smart words on it's side; idealism uses a nursery school dictionary. And you studied early to disguise your childhood pain. But it is not universal."
Author: Michael Arditti

36. "Cynicism has all the smart words on it's side; idealism uses a nursery school dictionary."
Author: Michael Arditti

37. "It has generally been assumed that of two opposing systems of philosophy, e.g., realism and idealism, one only can be true and one must be false; and so philosophers have been hopelessly divided on the question, which is the true one."
Author: Morris Raphael Cohen

38. "There were no rules when it came to writing, he said. Take a close look at the lives of poets and novelists, and what you wound up with was unalloyed chaos, an infinite jumble of exceptions. That was because writing was a disease, Tom continued, what you might call an infection or influenza of the spirit, and therefore it could strike anyone at any time. The young and the old, the strong and the weak, the drunk and the sober, the sane and the insane. Scan the roster of the giants and semi-giants, and you would discover writers who embraced every sexual proclivity, every political bent, and every human attribute — from the loftiest idealism to the most insidious corruption. They were criminals and lawyers, spies and doctors, soldiers and spinsters, travelers and shut-ins."
Author: Paul Auster

39. "Nothing has a more sinister effect on art than the artist's desire to prove that he's good. The terrible temptation of idealism! You must achieve mastery over your idealism, over your virtue as well as over your vice, aesthetic mastery over everything that drives you to write in the first place - your outrage, your politics, your grief, your love!"
Author: Philip Roth

40. "Without magic, there is no art. Without art, there is no idealism. Without idealism, there is no integrity. Without integrity, there is nothing but production."
Author: Raymond Chandler

41. "In those moments of moving through the streets with people who share one's beliefs comes the rare and magical possibility of a kind of populist communion...At such times it is as though the still small pool of one's own identity has been overrun by a great flood, bringing its own grand collective desires and resentments, scouring out that pool so thoroughly that one no longer feels fear or sees the reflections of oneself but is carried along on that insurrectionary surge. These moments when individuals find others who share their dreams, when fear is overwhelmed by idealism or by outrage, when people feel a strength that surprises them, are moments in which they become heroes—for what are heroes but those so motivated by ideals that fear cannot sway them, those who speak for us, those who have power for good? A person who never feels it is condemned to cynicism and isolation. In those moments everyone becomes a visionary, everyone becomes a hero."
Author: Rebecca Solnit

42. "Too often in the post-9/11 world, when the time has come to translate the moral, and essentially progressive, roots of foreign policy idealism into plans for American action, liberals have said, 'Duck."
Author: Richard Just

43. "Americans admire a people who can scratch a desert and produce a garden. The Israelis have shown qualities that Americans identify with: guts, patriotism, idealism, a passion for freedom. I have seen it. I know. I believe that."
Author: Richard M. Nixon

44. "The sharpest criticism often goes hand in hand with the deepest idealism and love of country."
Author: Robert F. Kennedy

45. "What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in the most disinterested and noble way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants."
Author: Robert Hughes

46. "Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness."
Author: Sidney Hook

47. "Idealisme adalah kemewahan terakhir yang hanya dimiliki oleh pemuda."
Author: Tan Malaka

48. "Americanism is a question of principle, of idealism, of character. It is not a matter of birthplace, or creed, or line of descent."
Author: Theodore Roosevelt

49. "Virtually no idea is too ridiculous to be accepted, even by very intelligent and highly educated people, if it provides a way for them to feel special and important. Some confuse that feeling with idealism."
Author: Thomas Sowell

50. "I prefer truth-based entertaining idealism."
Author: Toba Beta

Idealism Quotes Pictures