Top 94 The Idealist Quotes
#1. The true idealist pursues what his heart says is right in a way that his head says will work.
Richard M. Nixon
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. The difference between an idealist and a fanatic is the idealist is only 90% sure he's right.
Jim Payne
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. Anyone can be an idealist. Anyone can be a cynic. The hard part lies somewhere in the middle.
Hugh MacLeod
#11. America: A place where Realists have the freedom to be Idealists.
Dortha Jackson
#12. THE GAMBLER,THE NUN,& THE RADIO
I am a poor idealist. I am a victim of illusions. He laughed.
Ernest Hemingway,
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. Cynic: an idealist whose rose-colored glasses have been removed, snapped in two and stomped into the ground, immediately improving his vision
Rick Bayan
#16. 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
#17. 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
#19. 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
#20. The idealist and dreamer will stubbornly go down with the ship. The serial innovator grabs the rudder and changes course.
Larry Osborne
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. I have tried to be a man of letters in love with ideas in order to be a wiser and more loving person, hoping to leave the world just a little better than I found it.
Cornel West
#24. [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
#25. Any idealist who tries to join the Peace Corps must realize he is not going to change the world overnight.
Sargent Shriver
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. The opposite of an idealist is too often a man without love.
Albert Camus
#33. Idealists are not the good friends of the truths; they create their own truth.
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. The only option for a pure idealist is to commit suicide.
Wu Guoguang
#38. An idealist. The most dangerous kind of man there was. And
James S.A. Corey
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#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. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. Nothing was easier to shatter than the fragile shield of an idealist.
Kristin Hannah
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. Every great man of business has got somewhere a touch of the idealist in him.
Woodrow Wilson
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. The idealist regards facts as provisional.
Mason Cooley
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. The leader has to be practical and a realist, yet must talk the language of the visionary and the idealist.
Eric Hoffer
#69. I'm still an idealist. My manager is always trying to talk me out of it, but that's just the way I am.
Ariel Rechtshaid
#70. A pragmatic person sees the dark and the light side of life, while an
idealist sees a life filled with colors.
Eraldo Banovac
#71. I am an idealist who believes in reality, and who, therefore, in all i write strive to be real, to keep both my own feet and the feet of my readers on the ground so that no matter how high we dream our dreams will be based on reality
Jack London
#72. 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
#73. Now of all the idealist abominations that make society pestiferous I doubt if there be any so mean as that of forcing self-sacrifice on a woman under the pretense that she likes it.
George Bernard Shaw
#74. 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
#75. I know that if you spend enough on each person person in a village, you will change their lives. If you put in enough resources-enough mzungu,foreigners, technical assistance, and money-lives change. I know that....The problem is, when you walk, what happens? -Simon Bland
Nina Munk
#76. If you are not an idealist by the time you are twenty you have no heart, but if you are still an idealist by the time you are thirty, you don't have a head.
Randolph Bourne
#77. The idealist is incorrigible: if he is thrown out of his heaven he makes an ideal of his hell.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#78. What is Southern California but an ever-changing dreamscape backdrop for the postmodern ideal? The psychology of the postmodern world is the continual state of change as we live in its idealist manufactured dream, built by developers.
John Van Hamersveld
#79. But Wilson was an idealist who believed that the force of righteousness would overcome all obstacles. He underestimated the need to flatter, cajole, and seduce.
Ken Follett
#80. From the saintly and single-minded idealist to the fanatic is often but a step.
Friedrich Hayek
#81. I'm not an idealist. I know we're not going to be living in a world that's peace and love all the time. But we can live in a world where we kill each other a lot less.
Michael Franti
#82. The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe, he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.
Henry Miller
#83. The Platonic idealist is the man by nature so wedded to perfection that he sees in everything not the reality but the faultless ideal which the reality misses and suggests.
George Santayana
#84. The idealist hopes. The romantic sees doom. The postmodernist sees doom and hopes.
Bauvard
#85. I am a realist as well as an idealist, and I think that it is incumbent upon those of us in opposition to try to work within what are always arduous circumstances to stretch the limits of the possible.
Todd Gitlin
#86. The idealist withdrew himself, because he could not suffer the jostling of the human crowd; he had not the strength to fight and so called the battle vulgar; he was vain, and since his fellows would not take him at his own estimate, consoled himself with despising his fellows.
W. Somerset Maugham
#87. Scratch the surface of most cynics and you find a frustrated idealist - someone who made the mistake of converting his ideals into expectations.
Peter M. Senge
#88. You're an idealist, and I pity you as I would the village idiot.
Stanley Kubrick
#89. I'm an idealist. I don't know where I'm going but I'm on the way.
Carl Sandburg
#90. Man is born a predestined idealist, for he is born to act. To act is to affirm the worth of an end, and to persist in affirming the worth of an end is to make an ideal.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
#91. When I was younger, I was somewhat of an idealist. I guess I'm a little bit more of a realist now. I think there's a lot that can be done to make the world a better place, but it's more about choosing your battles.
Conor Oberst
#92. Really, I have to laugh because there was a whole set of stories that made me sound like the Dragon Lady, you know, 'tough this and tough that.' Then there is this business about 'gooey.' The bottom line is I am a pragmatic idealist.
Madeleine Albright
#93. Wives invariably flourish when deserted; ... it is the deserting male, the reckless idealist rushing about the world seeking a non-existent felicity, who often ends in disaster.
William McFee
#94. When it comes down to it, Matthew was just another disillusioned idealist, an over-reactive Hamlet type--couldn't take it that the world was real.
Graham Swift
