Top 100 Quotes About Idealism
#1. Words without actions are the assassins of idealism.
Herbert Hoover
#2. Teens are passionate, questioning, curious, have a bit of the idealism I still cling to, and they're making decisions for the first time that can alter the course of their lives - and sometimes, the course of the world.
Mary E. Pearson
#3. 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.
David Talbot
#4. My dear Guiliano," he said, "how is it that you and Don Croce do not join together to rule Sicily? He has the wisdom of age, you have the idealism of youth.
Mario Puzo
#5. Ideas are great arrows, but there has to be a bow. And politics is the bow of idealism.
Bill Moyers
#6. Over the past decade ... while many businesses have pursued what I call 'business as usual,' I have been part of a different, smaller business movement, one that tried to put idealism back on the agenda.
Anita Roddick
#7. At present, our country needs women's idealism and determination, perhaps more in politics than anywhere else.
Shirley Chisholm
#8. 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.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#9. Marriage is love put to it's ultimate test - the grindstone of life. Where the idealism of love meets the everydayness of marriage.
Carew Papritz
#10. Honesty can sometimes be so brutal to take in. It's usual to get so drowned in perceived idealism that you can't seem to separate it from honest reality. If, and when, you can separate the two, the gaiety of fantasy is destroyed
Ufuoma Apoki
#11. Quiet heroism or youthful idealism, or both? What do we know? That life without heroism and idealism is not worth living - or that either can be fatal?
Erich Segal
#12. Contemplate the choice between going after money or ideals. There is so much pressure to go for money, idealism gets little airplay. Do something that means something to you.
Shere Hite
#13. The Revolution was a lesson in the power of evil to replace idealism, and Bonaparte was its ideal pupil.
Paul Johnson
#14. The power of youth is the common wealth for the entire world. The faces of young people are the faces of our past, our present and our future. No segment in the society can match with the power, idealism, enthusiasm and courage of the young people.
Kailash Satyarthi
#15. I want to remember what bullshit looks like when weapons of mass destruction are diagrammed out and whacko "intelligence" is delivered in an ominous way to strike fear into people and especially to pull on the idealism and zeal of the young.
Louise Erdrich
#16. The conception of the necessary unit of all that is resolves itself into the poverty of the imagination, and a freer logic emancipates us from the straitwaistcoated benevolent institution, which idealism palms off as the totality of being.
Bertrand Russell
#17. The sad end he met in Afghanistan was more accurately a function of his stubborn idealism
his insistence on trying to do the right thing. In which case it wasn't a tragic flaw that brought Tillman down, but a tragic virtue.
Jon Krakauer
#19. [On Jane Austen] She was fully possessed of the idealism which is a necessary ingredient of the great satirist. If she criticized the institutions of earth, it was because she had very definite ideas regarding the institutions of heaven.
Rebecca West
#22. We came together [with King Hussein of Jordan] because of a shared sense of idealism, of the value of service to a community far greater than ourselves, and the conviction that each and everyone of us can meaningfully contribute to solving even the most seemingly intractable problems.
Queen Noor Of Jordan
#23. The idealism of the left is a very selfish idealism. In their war against 'the rich' and big business, they don't care how much collateral damage there is to workers who end up end up unemployed.
Thomas Sowell
#25. One thing I carried my whole life, especially from my grandparents in Chicago, was a huge idealism for the world.
Abigail Washburn
#26. It is instructive, for instance, to trace the computer industry's decline in vision, idealism, creativity, romance and sheer fun as it becomes more and more important and prosperous.
Robert Shea
#27. The more idealism proves futile, the more I respect idealists.
Marty Rubin
#28. 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
#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.
Josiah Royce
#30. I don't think that brutality and idealism are mutually exclusive. It's a common denominator in my work - rabid idealism.
Richard Grossman
#31. Twenty-year-olds have a kind of emotional idealism about relationships and about the world that enables them to say, 'No, you lied to me. Goodbye.' When they see wickedness, they walk away.
Lorrie Moore
#32. I think it is important for readers to know that it is possible to bring intellectualism and idealism to the White House and still be political enough to advance an agenda.
A. Scott Berg
#33. Too often, young people who are just bursting with idealism either find themselves playing a game for which they have little heart or are hurling themselves into wasteful protests against the so-called Establishment.
George W. Romney
#34. What is undeniable is that when comforts and convenience sap our energies and idealism, inactivity secretes sloth in to our minds like a poison in the blood.
Os Guinness
#35. Pseudo idealism: apparent charitable behaviour that on scrutiny is revealed as selfish, because the giver is engaging in it only so that he or she can feel good about him or herself
Jeremy Griffith
#36. 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.
Richard Just
#37. Americans have been remarkably devoted to the capacity for belief, to idealism. That's why we get into trouble all the time. We're always viewed as naive.
A. Bartlett Giamatti
#38. It is cynicism, and not idealism, that is generally the mark of youthful immaturity, or rather it is the cynic who is generally the most foolish romantic.
Andrew Sarris
#39. Carley saw two forces in life--the destructive and constructive. On the one side greed, selfishness, materialism: on the other generosity, sacrifice, and idealism.
Zane Grey
#40. 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)
Mary Doria Russell
#41. 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
#42. Fond of bewailing the decadence of the modern world, of denouncing the younger generation for its lack of idealism and public spirit, he is blind to the fact of his own enormous selfishness. He is one of those invalids who make use of their real or imagined sufferings to get their own way.
Christopher Isherwood
#43. School is such an encouraging and safe environment. It's filled with idealism and just really working on your craft. When you enter the business world - where art meets commerce - it can become quite depressing.
Troy Garity
#44. Our civilization is first and foremost a civilization of means; in the reality of modern life, the means, it would seem, are more important than the ends. Any other assessment of the situation is mere idealism.
Jacques Ellul
#45. Theodore Rex. Roosevelt was driven by ambition, idealism and vanity. As his daughter famously remarked: My father always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding, and the baby at every christening.
Margaret MacMillan
#46. America is a country in which I see the most persistant idealism and the blandest of cynicism and the race is on between its vitality and its decadence.
Alistair Cooke
#47. The only really wicked men i have ever known were those who started as idealists. that is what depravity feeds on. illusions and idealism and love gone wrong.
Prosper Merimee
#48. Idealism without consequences is the pathetic dream of every spoiled brat
Otessa Moshfegh
#50. By concentrating on what is good in people, by appealing to their idealism and their sense of justice, and by asking them to put their faith in the future, socialists put themselves at a severe disadvantage.
Ian McEwan
#51. The Church needs your faith, your idealism, and your generosity, so that she can always be young in Spirit.
Pope Benedict XVI
#52. He wanted to toast mad idealism, forbidden desires, the dreams that drove one to criminal acts. He wanted, quite starkly, oblivion.
Paul Russell
#53. Miller watched a little piece of the man's idealism die and was sorry that it gave him joy. So
James S.A. Corey
#54. A lot of my writer friends - some of whom are brilliant - work when the Muse calls them, for lack of a better description. You know, days of nothing, then this creative burst where they write for 36 hours straight fueled by caffeine and idealism.
G. Willow Wilson
#55. He 's ruthless only because of his ideals. Unfortunately he doesn't succeed. The thing fails and gets out of hand and takes charge of him. Idealism is the only excuse he could have and it's a great excuse.
Terence Fisher
#56. Without idealism, politics is reduced to a form of social accounting, the day-to-day administration of men and things. This too is something that a conservative can survive well enough. But for the Left it is a catastrophe.
Tony Judt
#57. 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.
John Grisham
#58. Idealism in the young, I guess I'm saying, is curiosity as well as goodness trying to express itself.
Dorothy Day
#59. Presently we began to have our slices of the national cake," F. Scott Fitzgerald remembered, "and our idealism only flared up when the newspapers made melodrama out of such stories as Harding and the Ohio Gang or Sacco and Vanzetti.
Bruce Watson
#60. It is very important that you express your idealism actively, to what ever extent you can, for this increases your sense of worth and power ...
Seth
#61. The world isn't black and white, good or bad. The battles that make a real difference are fought in the murky area in between, where the greater good requires brutal sacrifice. Where both the means and the ends are just shadows in a featureless gray landscape. And that was the death of my idealism.
Rachel Vincent
#62. In your late teens and early twenties, everything is idealism. Everything should just work in black and white. That's good. You need that. I think most revolutions are started by people in their teens and twenties.
LeCrae
#63. Watching him, Juliana thought, It's idealism that makes him that bitter. Asking too much out of life. Always moving on, restless and griped.
Philip K. Dick
#64. Give and you shall receive' is not sentimental idealism, it is a simple, practical rule. That which we can and must give to the land is work, and if that work is given in love it will not be drudgery.
Walter Ernest Christopher James
#65. I've always wanted to play Don Quixote in some way. It's a great role. I think the idealism of the man shows that hope that we have in the human breast to achieve something.
Dominic Chianese
#66. Author sees the "congested idealism" of the generally discontent as reservoir that will support centralized power even while disagreeing with many specific provisions.
Sinclair Lewis
#67. If capitalism begins as the practical idealism of the aspiring bourgeoisie, it ends ... as an orgy of materialism.
Talcott Parsons
#69. In the revolt against idealism, the ambiguities of the word experience have been perceived, with the result that realists have more and more avoided the word.
Bertrand Russell
#70. Idealism is the death of the body and the imagination. All but freedom, utter freedom, is death
Anais Nin
#71. Centuries and centuries of idealism have not failed to influence reality
Jorge Luis Borges
#72. Perhaps women have always been in closer contact with reality than men: it would seem to be the just recompense for being deprived of idealism.
Germaine Greer
#73. What you have now is a Hollywood that is pure poison. Hollywood was a central place in the history of art in the 20th century: it was human idealism preserved. And then, like any great place, it collapsed, and it collapsed into the most awful machinery in the world.
Emir Kusturica
#74. An age deficient in idealism has ever been one of immorality and superficial attainment, since without the sense of ideas, nobility of character becomes of rare attainment, if possible.
Amos Bronson Alcott
#75. Koch's youthful idealism about libertarianism had largely devolved into a rationale for corporate self-interest.
John Charles Chasteen
#76. Chivalry - ... a romantic idealism closely related to Christianity, which makes honor the guiding principle of conduct. Connected with this is the ancient concept of the gentleman.
Richard M. Weaver
#77. The young habitually mistake lust for love, they're infested with idealism of all kinds.
Margaret Atwood
#78. Ego trips by coteries of self-exalting people are treated in the media as idealism, rather than the petty tyranny it is.
Thomas Sowell
#79. Visionary idealism is a male art form. The lesbian aesthete does not exist. But if there were one, she would have learned from the perverse male mind.
Camille Paglia
#80. To endure the pain of living, we all drug ourselves more or less with gin, with literature, with superstitions, with romance, with idealism, political, sentimental, and moral, with every possible preparation of that universal hashish: imagination.
George Bernard Shaw
#81. I prefer truth-based entertaining idealism.
Toba Beta
#82. We all have idealism. We think we're healthy and then, all of a sudden, one day, you have cancer. The truth has a mind of its own.
Oliver Stone
#83. The sublimated idealism of the Enlightenment, the spirit of the League of Nations and of the United Nations Charter have not proved strong enough to control the aggressive dynamism of nationalism.
Christopher Dawson
#84. The natural idealism of youth is an idealism, alas, for which we do not always provide as many outlets as we should.
Sargent Shriver
#85. Insight that dawns slowly seems to me to have more lasting effects than a fitful idealism, which is unlikely to hold out for long.
Carl Jung
#87. The single most amazing phenomenon is the discrediting of idealism.
Susan Sontag
#88. Nobody believes that the man who says, 'Look, lady, you wanted equality,' to explain why he won't give up his seat to a pregnant woman carrying three grocery bags, a briefcase, and a toddler is seized with the symbolism of idealism.
Judith Martin
#89. Idealism may get us into the fray, but it is the loss of all we cherish that begins to form in us a heart capable of leading others reluctantly and humbly.
Dan B. Allender
#90. Idealism is like a castle in the air if it is not based on a solid foundation of social and political realism.
Claude McKay
#91. Look, I would say that anyone who does this work and doesn't have a strain of idealism is an adrenaline junkie or completely narcissistic. There is no other justification. You're risking your life, and if anything happens, it's our families who suffer tremendously.
Lynsey Addario
#92. Idealism springs from deep feelings, but feelings are nothing without the formulated idea that keeps them whole.
Jacques Barzun
#93. [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 ...
Anais Nin
#94. I think that one of the benefits of optimism and idealism is that they lead you into things you would never have tried if you'd let yourself imagine how hard it was going to turn out to be.
Romeo Dallaire
#95. Women are the only realists; their whole object in life is to pit their realism against the extravagant, excessive, and occasionally drunken idealism of men.
G.K. Chesterton
#96. Idealism misconstrues agency, implying the capacity to bring about influence where that capacity may not exist or where it may only be weak.
James Davison Hunter
#97. The resulting union of idealism and love of power has led men astray over and over again, and is still doing so in the present day.
Anonymous
#98. Over the years I have felt that both the IAS and IPS have developed a kind of feudal class consciousness that does not go well with the service to the people that India needs. Their initial idealism begins to diminish within a few years of service and they gradually become part of the furniture.
Kuldip Nayar
#100. 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
Aldous Huxley
