Top 100 Idealist Quotes
#1. There's no question I am an idealist, which is another way of saying 'I am an American.'
Ronald Reagan
#2. an idealist is a hypocrite, because he is always trying to become what he is not, instead of being and understanding what he is.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#3. I may be a businessman in that I set up and run companies for profit, but when I try to plan ahead and dream up new products and new companies, I'm an idealist.
Richard Branson
#4. The true idealist pursues what his heart says is right in a way that his head says will work.
Richard M. Nixon
#5. A cynic should never marry an idealist. For the cynic, marriage represents the welcome end of romantic life, with all its agony and ecstasy. But for the idealist, it is only the beginning.
Julie Burchill
#6. Now I call myself a bleeding heart libertarian. Because I do believe in the principles of Libertarianism as an ideal - because I'm an idealist.
Neil Peart
#8. The difference between an idealist and a fanatic is the idealist is only 90% sure he's right.
Jim Payne
#9. I am an idealist. I believe in everything - I am only looking for proofs.
Carl Sandburg
#10. Making the decision to leave Valve strikes me as right up there with turning down the throne to Narnia, but then call me an idealist, and I guess I probably wouldn't want to spend my whole life making new hats for Team Fortress 2 either.
Yahtzee Croshaw
#11. None of this is fair to you. And should it continue, it will make it more difficult to keep attracting the kind of driven, patriotic, idealist Americans to public service that our citizens deserved and that our system of self-government demands.
Barack Obama
#13. Politics is not a game for naive thinkers. You may go in as an idealist, but you certainly won't come out as one.
Honeysuckle Weeks
#14. Any discussion between idealist and realist would never end.
Toba Beta
#15. She is Living and I'm Dead, but I'd like to believe we're both human. Call me an idealist.
Isaac Marion
#16. An idealist believes that the short run doesn't count. A cynic believes the long run doesn't matter. A realist believes that what is done or left undone in the short run determines the long run. - Sydney J. Harris
David Allen
#17. I've read a couple of reviews that say I'm getting harder in my old age but I don't think that's true at all. I think that you can't help but become a little cynical about life and love but I'm still a romantic, I'm still an idealist.
Madonna Ciccone
#18. The Minimalists are idealist. They want to minimize themselves in favor of the ideal ... But I just can't. You see, my paintings are not cool.
Agnes Martin
#19. The last remnants of Deanna the child--the idealist, the sheltered elite--had been torn loose by tonight's tragedies, slain with the same bullet that had felled her would-be killer. She had no idea who the new person inhabiting this shell of her old self would become. The realization frightened her.
Leslie Ann Moore
#20. Anyone can be an idealist. Anyone can be a cynic. The hard part lies somewhere in the middle.
Hugh MacLeod
#21. THE GAMBLER,THE NUN,& THE RADIO
I am a poor idealist. I am a victim of illusions. He laughed.
Ernest Hemingway,
#22. Of course you have always been an idealist, and filled with your optimistic dreams; but reality must at some time obtrude, and you are now turned thirty.
Margaret Atwood
#23. I am a misanthrope and yet utterly benevolent, have more than one screw loose yet am a super-idealist who digests philosophy more efficiently than food.
Alfred Nobel
#25. Don't make me into this airy-fairy, moralist, idealist because I'm not.
Madeleine Albright
#26. [Hayward] honestly mistook his sensuality for romantic emotion, his vacillation for artistic temperament, and his idleness for philosophical calm ... He was an idealist.
W. Somerset Maugham
#27. The young man is also an idealist. He has yet to find out that what's in the public interest is not what the public is interested in.
Terry Pratchett
#28. We come to think of an idealist as one who seeks to realize what is not in fact realizable. But, it is necessary to insist, to have ideals is not the same as to have impracticable ideals, however often it may be the case that our ideals are impracticable.
Susan Stebbing
#29. Cynic: an idealist whose rose-colored glasses have been removed, snapped in two and stomped into the ground, immediately improving his vision
Rick Bayan
#30. The impatient idealist says: 'Give me a place to stand and I shall move the earth.' But such a place does not exist. We all have to stand on the earth itself and go with her at her pace.
Chinua Achebe
#31. I'm an idealist
who has outgrown
my idealism
I have nothing to do
the rest of my life
but do it
and the rest of my life
to do it
Jack Kerouac
#32. Being an idealist is not being a simpleton; without idealists there would be no optimism and without optimism there would be no courage to achieve advances that so-called realists would have you believe could never come to fruition.
Alisa Steinberg
#35. I'm still a bit of a romantic and an idealist and hopelessly naive.
Brit Marling
#36. I used to think if it wasn't possible to be a family man and a totally dedicated artist, I'd rather be the former. I'm an idealist and a romantic.
Charlton Heston
#37. The idealist and dreamer will stubbornly go down with the ship. The serial innovator grabs the rudder and changes course.
Larry Osborne
#38. No one more cynical than an idealist.
Tanith Lee
#40. I'm an idealist without illusions.
[Ca. 1953, attributed to John F. Kennedy by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. in 'A Thousand Days'
John F. Kennedy
#41. All human beings are vines. But especially the idealist. He is a vine, and he needs to clutch and climb. And he despises the man who is a mere potato, or turnip, or lump of wood.
D.H. Lawrence
#42. The battered idealist. It's just my favorite character ... To me, a hero is somebody who is able to accept the environment of the world, deal with the stuff that's thrown in their path ... and somehow keep their heart.
Cameron Crowe
#43. Scratch a cynic and you'll find a disappointed idealist.
Jon F. Merz
#44. [The Devil] And after all, who knows whether proof of the devil is also proof of God? I want to join an idealist society and form an opposition within it: 'I'm a realist,' I'll say, 'not a materialist,' heh, heh!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#45. He was a militant idealist who crusaded against racial bigotry by growing faint in its presence.
Joseph Heller
#46. Any idealist who tries to join the Peace Corps must realize he is not going to change the world overnight.
Sargent Shriver
#47. The most important thing about the gentleman was that he was an idealist ... He was bred up to a code of self-restraint which taught resistance to pragmatic temptation. He was definitely a man of sentiment, who refused to put matters on a basis of materialism and self-aggrandizement.
Richard M. Weaver
#48. Americans ... are the most idealistic people in the whole world. Their only danger is that the idealist can easily become the idolator.
G.K. Chesterton
#49. In fact, science is neither materialist nor idealist; it is simply science. It's impartial and can't be answerable for the direction of its conclusions.
Valerian Pidmohylny
#50. Although sometimes I might sound sometimes idealist or too optimistic but I think my father used to say to me in everything bad there's something good that is going to come out of it and there will always be a tomorrow.
Saad Hariri
#51. An idealist is ahead of his time only in the sense that he is articulate. The same is true of a nation. For even primitive people, even effete races have a message for those above or below them. The heritage of the Ideal, however small can not be exhausted.
Ameen Rihani
#52. Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.
George Carlin
#53. Idealism is an ideal which is based on the idea of someone of the perfect world or the perfect life. An idealist fails to understand the limitation of his idea and believes that the real world can be converted into the world of his idea.
Awdhesh Singh
#54. A youth is susceptible to the influence of idealist notions. As a person ages, they notice a gap between their expectations and reality and they grow more pessimistic about the world and their ability to live up to the lofty notions that inspired a younger self.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#56. The opposite of an idealist is too often a man without love.
Albert Camus
#57. A strong man must be militant as well as moderate. He must be a realist as well as an idealist.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#59. World unity is the wish of the hopeful, the goal of the idealist and the dream of the romantic. Yet it is folly to the realist and a lie to the innocent.
Don Williams
#60. Sometimes people call me an idealist. Well, that is the way I know I am an American. America is the only idealistic nation in the world.
Woodrow Wilson
#61. The only option for a pure idealist is to commit suicide.
Wu Guoguang
#62. Every true heart needed a pragmatic counterweight, and every cynic an idealist to lift his spirits.
Neal Stephenson
#63. An idealist. The most dangerous kind of man there was. And
James S.A. Corey
#64. She lived and breathed the streets, and would lay her neck on the line to protect its occupants. But how did she tell an idealist that the world was not black and white?
Caroline Mitchell
#65. You see in such a world as this, an idealist -or perhaps it's only a sentimentalist-must be stoned to death. He makes the others so uncomfortable. He haunts them at their golf.
Ford Madox Ford
#66. I think it's realistic to have hope. One can be a perverse idealist and say the easiest thing: 'I despair. The world's no good.' That's a perverse idealist. It's practical to hope, because the hope is for us to survive as a human species. That's very realistic.
Studs Terkel
#67. I wince at her use of the word "human." I've never liked that differentiation. She is living and I'm dead, but we're both human. Call me an idealist.
Isaac Marion
#68. An idealist is a person who helps other people to be prosperous.
Henry Ford
#69. An ethical idealist, a person whom embraces the honorable philosophy of ethical idealism, performs acts that are honest, pure, and righteous regardless of their fearfulness.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#70. An idealist who couldn't cope becomes cynical.
Amy Ray
#71. For the establishment, philosophy is both an elitist and an idealist discipline: In high school, it is a compulsory subject; at university, they teach the idealist line. They are conducting a conversation with themselves.
Michel Onfray
#72. An idealist believes the short run doesn't count. A cynic believes the long run doesn't matter. A realist believes that what is done or left undone in the short run determines the long run.
Sydney J. Harris
#73. The Trevanian Buff is a strange and wonderful creature: an outsider, a natural elitist, not so much a cynic as an idealist mugged by reality, not just one of those who march to a different drummer, but the solo drummer in a parade of one.
Trevanian
#74. all idealist philosophies devour their own feet without realizing it.
Etienne Gilson
#75. Nothing was easier to shatter than the fragile shield of an idealist.
Kristin Hannah
#76. A realist is an idealist who has gone through the fire and been purified. A skeptic is an idealist who has gone through the fire and been burned.
Warren W. Wiersbe
#77. The truth is that there are two men in Ibsen - an idealist, exalted to the verge of sentimentality, and a critic, hard, inexorable, remorseless, to the verge of cynicism. What we call his "social philosophy" is a modus vivendi arrived at between them. Both agree in repudiating "marriage for love";
Henrik Ibsen
#78. Every great man of business has got somewhere a touch of the idealist in him.
Woodrow Wilson
#79. I am a misanthrope, but exceedingly benevolent; I am very cranky, and am a super-idealist ... I can digest philosophy better than food.
Alfred Nobel
#80. Truth, though, is nothing in the face of self-falsehood, and principles are of no value if the idealist cannot live up to his own standards.
R.A. Salvatore
#81. There is a possessiveness in the idealist's attitude . . . . "You are to be like me. I will shape you, or hammer you, into the shape of my ideal. You must enjoy my pleasures. Your tastes must coincide with mind. You must have only my values. You must be restricted by my limitations
Caryll Houselander
#82. The democratic idealist is prone to make light of the whole question of standards and leadership because of his unbounded faith in the plain people.
Irving Babbitt
#83. Living with a dog is easy- like living with an idealist.
H.L. Mencken
#84. It's easy to be a naive idealist. It's easy to be a cynical realist. It's quite another thing to have no illusions and still hold the inner flame.
Marie-Louise Von Franz
#85. We know the meaning of all the myths. We know the last secret revealed to the perfect initiate. And it is not the voice of a priest or a prophet saying 'These things are.' It is the voice of a dreamer and an idealist crying, 'Why cannot these things be?
G.K. Chesterton
#86. The idealist regards facts as provisional.
Mason Cooley
#87. A grin that wasn't natural, and that combined in a strange way affection and arrogance, the arrogance of the idealist who doesn't realize how easily he can be fooled.
Frank O'Connor
#88. Reality will always prevail so why help it? Be an idealist and see what happens.
Simon Sinek
#89. The cynic finds love with the idealist. The rebel with the conformist. The social butterfly with the bookworm. They help each other balance their lives.
Joyce Brothers
#90. I'm not an idealist anymore, I'm a bitter realist.
Soe Hok Gie
#91. You'd be a fool or a deluded idealist to think ethics would be prominent on Wall Street. That is not a statement against people in the money business, just a fact.
Steven Levitt
#92. I want to introduce you to Jay, a 'bus-conductor and an idealist. She is not the heroine, but the most constantly apparent woman in this book. I cannot introduce you to a heroine because I have never met one.
Stella Benson
#95. Three qualities of greatness stood out in Woodrow Wilson. He was a man of staunch morals. He was more than just an idealist; he was the personification of the heritage of idealism of the American people. He brought spiritual concepts to the peace table. He was a born crusader.
Herbert Hoover
#96. Charles Kiss is a legendary James Bond-style British spy. And McGrath is the young idealist who is given the task of following in his footsteps. It's a mission that forces McGrath to question everything he thought he believed in.
Peter Milligan
#97. Do you ever think you're being an idealist? Do you ever wonder if you're holding out for something that doesn't exist? I'm not being pessimistic, and although I'd like to believe that a boom or we or us exists, I'm not sure I do anymore. Maybe I've been holding out for something that's unrealistic.
Karyn Bosnak
#98. You cannot prove realism to a complete sceptic or idealist; but you can show an honest man that he is not a complete sceptic or idealist, but a realist at heart. So long as he is alive his sincere philosophy must fulfil the assumptions of his life and not destroy him.
George Santayana
#99. I was very excited about the idea that I could be an idealist, that I could be my age, the eager beaver who had hope in the justice system and the one who gets disappointed just like the audience.
Elisabeth Rohm
#100. Idealism is one of the greatest forces in the world. It makes seeming impossibilities possible and succeeds where prudence fails. But unless the idealist is brave and has the courage to face the truth, his idealism creates nothing.
Grenville Kleiser
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