Top 95 Quotes About Idealists
#1. Oh my dear, idealists are the cruelest monsters of them all.
Sarah Vowell
#2. I've never understood the division between so-called realists and so-called idealists.
Hillary Clinton
#4. Antislavery idealists might prefer to live in some better world, which like all such places was too good to be true. The American nation in 1790, however, was a real world, laden with legacies like slavery, and therefore too true to be good.
Joseph J. Ellis
#5. When people who are seeking change start out, they are driven by commitment to a cause. But as internecine power struggles take over, one-time idealists fall prey to corruption. They become just as corrupt and manipulative as the system that they want to overthrow.
Anurag Kashyap
#6. Thus we kept on like true idealists, rejecting the evidence of our senses
Henry David Thoreau
#7. I would agree that President Carter didn't live up to the expectation we all had when he came in 1976. My husband and I were young idealists who worked on his campaign.
Michele Bachmann
#8. Idealists , workers of thought, unite to show how inspiration and genius walk in step with the progress of the machine , of aircraft, of industry, of trade, of the sciences, of electricity.
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
#9. Most idealists lived in their own impossible worlds, sealed away from reality; Maryam, it seemed, effortlessly reached out from hers and drew others inside.
Helene Wecker
#11. It is always easy to divide the world into idealists and power-oriented people. The idealists are presumed to be the noble people, and the power-oriented people are the ones that cause all the world's trouble.
Henry A. Kissinger
#12. Questioning growth is deemed to be the act of lunatics, idealists and revolutionaries. But question it we must.
Tim Jackson
#13. The great German idealists from Kant to Hegel saw this idealism or nihilism as a reductio ad absurdum of any philosophy, and so they struggled by all conceptual means to avoid it.
Frederick C. Beiser
#14. When they come downstairs from their Ivory Towers, idealists are very apt to walk straight into the gutter.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#15. America: A place where Realists have the freedom to be Idealists.
Dortha Jackson
#18. Sham idealists: the quite large number of people who profess ideals as a form of premium for other-life insurance, and are content to lay up slavery and destitution for their descendants so long as they are enabled to produce personal copybooks of elevated views at the gate of heaven.
John Wyndham
#19. We're all idealists," said Lord Silverman, smoothing over the conflict like a good host. "That's why we're in politics. People without ideals don't bother. But we have to confront the realities of elections and public opinion.
Ken Follett
#20. What about Jesus Christ? I say that he was a precursor of idealists; a precursor of socialists.
Mikhail Gorbachev
#21. Bismarck fought 'necessary' wars and killed thousands, the idealists of the twentieth century fight 'just' wars and kill millions.
A.J.P. Taylor
#22. 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
#24. Those of us who are condemned as radicals, idealists, and dreamers call for basic reforms that, if enacted, would make peaceful reform possible. But corporate capitalists, now unchecked by state power and dismissive of the popular will, do not see the fires they are igniting.
Chris Hedges
#25. We're automatons in a symphony conducted by a lunatic and performed by blind idealists. Damon
Eleni Papanou
#26. War is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of idealists by cynics and of troops by politicians.
Chris Hedges
#28. DANTON: Could you indeed? It's you idealists who make the best tyrants.
ROBESPIERRE: It seems a bit late to be having this conversation. I've had to take up violence now, and so much else. We should have discussed it last year.
Hilary Mantel
#29. There were moments when Szara suspected that many idealists drawn to Communism were, at heart, people with an appetite for clandestine life.
Alan Furst
#30. The Venus Project is neither Utopian nor Orwellian, nor does it reflect the dreams of impractical idealists. Instead, it presents attainable goals requiring only the intelligent application of what we already know. The only limitations are those which we impose upon ourselves.
Jacque Fresco
#31. Children are great idealists, until the stupidity of their elders puts out the fires of the aspirations.
Nellie L. McClung
#32. We are all idealists in that we are ever discontented with the present state of the Ego and the World.
Ameen Rihani
#33. On the silver screen, capitalists are usually vilified as greedy and heartless, while statists of every stripe are depicted as selfless, romantic idealists who only want to help people.
Lawrence Reed
#34. Teachers are by nature idealists, and they believe anything can be learned.
Susan Wiggs
#35. Idealists are not the good friends of the truths; they create their own truth.
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#36. Among idealists and visionaries, there is no shortage of good intent, but there's often a shortage of discipline.
Scott Belsky
#37. We are all born idealists, until life fucks us all.
M.F. Moonzajer
#38. It is curious that Christianity, which is idealism, is sturdily defended by the brokers, and steadily attacked by the idealists.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#39. Cynics are merely idealists with unusually high standards.
Alain De Botton
#40. That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been; or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds; our history ever a tale told by inattentive idealists.
Ralph Ellison
#41. I always thought youth were idealists - now, I'm not so sure - I'm more idealistic now then at 17 ...
John Geddes
#42. The starry-eyed idealists of today have submerged their critical faculties beneath a tidal wave of slop marketed by those old hippies who now sell a user-friendly dilution of their original enlightenment.
Peter J. Carroll
#43. 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
#44. Because if we were all created idealists, then life was bound to be one relentless disappointment. But then, there was also music. We unlearned the lies with one hand and repeated them with the other.
Nikolai Grozni
#45. All cynics are disappointed idealists. The more stars in the eyes, the harder the fall.
Josh Lanyon
#46. He looked older, harder, perhaps wiser. The Middle East was like that. It turned hope to despair, idealists into Machiavellians.
Daniel Silva
#47. We are dissatisfied because we are idealists. We
Anton Chekhov
#48. We're all idealists, all materialists; and the final judgment or label is simply a matter of ideology, or, if you prefer, of political commitment.
Fredric Jameson
#49. Idealists and reformers all become executioners in their turn. The road to utopia ends with the steps of the scaffold, the endless moment of the guillotine.
Grant Morrison
#50. In the construction of a country, it is not the practical workers but the idealists and planners that are difficult to find.
Sun Yat-sen
#51. Finally, the president added, 'The American people are idealists, but they also want their leaders to be realistic ...
Bob Woodward
#52. Feminism is ridiculous. Feminists are silly idealists who want to be on top. There is no real equality in sexual relationships - someone always wins.
Mary McCarthy
#53. God save us from idealists! They dream of a world without injustice, and what crime won't they commit to get it! I swear, Mirella, I'll settle for a world with good manners.
Mary Doria Russell
#54. The Big Bang has made Idealists out of almost anybody who thinks. First there was absolutely nothing, then Bang! Something. This is beyond weird. Out of sheerest Emptiness, manifestation arises.
Ken Wilber
#55. I fear that, in the end, the famous debate among materialists, idealists, and dualists amounts to a merely verbal dispute that is more a matter for the linguist than for the speculative philosopher.
Moses Mendelssohn
#56. The more idealism proves futile, the more I respect idealists.
Marty Rubin
#57. Everything, all of it ... it has been a huge mistake. This is what they need of you, isn't it? This is what idealists and visionaries ask of you - to make their mistakes for them.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#58. The idealists dream and the dream is told, and the practical men listen and ponder and bring back the truth and apply it to human life, and progress and growth and higher human ideals come into being and so the world moves ever on.
Anna Howard Shaw
#59. The early idealists and companies and governments have all assumed that the Internet will bring freedom. Yet China proves that this is not the case.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#60. Success is achieved by people who deeply understand reality and know how to use it to get what they want. The converse is also true: idealists who are not well-grounded in reality create problems, not progress.
Ray Dalio
#61. 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
#62. Children see things very well sometimes - and idealists even better.
Lorraine Hansberry
#63. It seems to be the fate of idealists to obtain what they have struggled for in a form which destroys their ideals.
Bertrand Russell
#64. Man's indecency to man all over the world rules out the idea of humanity as an actuality. It is a dream of young idealists. In practice a misnomer
Errol Flynn
#65. Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.
Jonathan Franzen
#66. Idealists are either blind or clowns; because they think it is possible to have a beautiful world with asshole creatures like humans.
M.F. Moonzajer
#67. The idealists will always be in society, and we will survive.
John Zorn
#68. Opportunists are promoted, realists are co-opted, idealists are frightened and radicals are shot.
Heather Marsh
#69. Shahid was the free spirit of the Kamal family: a dreamer, an idealist, a wanderer on the face of the earth
or, as Ahmed would put it, a lazy fuckwit.
John Lanchester
#70. The reason why we believe that change is possible is not because we are idealists but because we believe we have made it, so other people can make it as well.
Romeo Dallaire
#71. Disarming an idealist was easy. One only needed to ask why the idealist was not on the front line of the particular battle he had chosen.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#72. The college idealists who fill the ranks of the environmental movement seem willing to do absolutely anything to save the biosphere, except take science courses and learn something about it.
P. J. O'Rourke
#73. This is the country for cruel experiments - it's where idealists are sent to die, my friend. Killing people who believe in things is our national sport." With
Philip Kerr
#74. Cynics are - beneath it all - only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
Alain De Botton
#75. Neither idealists nor materialists are right; we must take both idea and expression.
Swami Vivekananda
#76. Post-national, welfare-state, cooperative, pacific Europe was not born of the optimistic, ambitious, forward-looking project imagined in fond retrospect by today's Euro-idealists. It was the insecure child of anxiety.
Tony Judt
#77. Idealists mature badly. If they can't outgrow their idealism, they become hypocrites or blind.
Brent Weeks
#78. I say let's be idealists. "Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not yet see" (Hebrews 11:1).
Shane Claiborne
#79. There is no proletarian, not even a Communist movement, that has not operated in the interests of money, and for the time being permitted by money - and that without the idealists among its leaders having the slightest suspicion of the fact.
Oswald Spengler
#80. But even as every promise was broken, the party kept on gaining followers. Many were idealists, some were opportunists, others thugs. They displayed astonishing faith and almost fanatical conviction, sometimes even after they themselves had ended up being devoured by the party machinery. A
Frank Dikotter
#81. Which is more remarkable fact about America: that millionaires are idealists or idealists become millionaires.
Ludwig Boltzmann
#82. Idealists foolish enough to throw caution to the winds have advanced mankind and have enriched the world.
Emma Goldman
#83. Thane had never been one of the idealists; he'd accepted Wedge Antilles's invitation not because he believed the Rebellion was pure good but because he'd learned the Empire was pure evil.
Claudia Gray
#84. The Internet promised a truly global egalitarian age. That was the idea, anyway. The international and unstructured nature of the thing was vital to these early Internet idealists. If knowledge is power, then power at long last would reside where it belonged, with the people, all people!
Mark Bowden
#85. If anarchists are idealists, they may simply be likened to someone who finds himself swimming in a cesspool and, rather than paddling about looking for the area with the least amount of floating faeces, seeks to climb out of the pool completely.
Robert Higgs
#86. Cynics regarded everybody as equally corrupt ... Idealists regarded everybody as equally corrupt, except themselves.
Robert Anton Wilson
#87. Brant's an idealist, and he's competent. There are few more dangerous combinations in this world ... Heroes are even more dangerous than idealists.
Patricia C. Wrede
#88. What's the truth? The truth is what people WANT. Liars are basically idealists, liars are saints and prophets. Jesus was a liar.
Jane Rogers
#89. We were idealists. We thought that when we got the vote the whole pattern of politics would be greatly improved and would be dominated by women.
Jessie Daniel Ames
#90. True idealists are rare; they are the dedicated workers, who would, if need be, die at the stake.
Henry Williamson
#91. Is it just possible,' he sighed, 'that the most vigorous and obldest idealists have been the worst enemies of human progress instead of its greatest creators?
Sinclair Lewis
#92. It is interesting that we call something good a "dream," but being called a "dreamer" is somewhat of a putdown.
Without dreamers, no dream would ever be given reality, and we would live in a very small and shallow world.
If you are a secret dreamer, it's your time to announce yourself.
Vera Nazarian
#93. All idealists imagine that the causes they serve are fundamentally better than any other causes in the world, and they refuse to believe that if their cause is to flourish at all it requires precisely the same foul-smelling manure that is necessary to all other human undertakings.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#95. But idealists of course are unpredictable. They tend to be the ones who turn bitter overnight, deceived by lies they've told themselves.
Don DeLillo
