Quotes About Idealism

“Scratch any cynic and you will find a disappointed idealist.”
― George Carlin

“Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Freedom

“Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one”
― John Lennon, Imagine

“For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments. And all the time your soul is craving and longing for something else. And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking in these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him!”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights: And Other Stories

“A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it makes a better soup.”
― Bertrand Russell

“The idealist hopes. The romantic sees doom. The postmodernist sees doom and hopes.”
― Bauvard, Evergreens Are Prudish

“Falling in love is very real, but I used to shake my head when people talked about soul mates, poor deluded individuals grasping at some supernatural ideal not intended for mortals but sounded pretty in a poetry book. Then, we met, and everything changed, the cynic has become the converted, the sceptic, an ardent zealot.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly

“An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.”
― H.L. Mencken

“It's my duty as a human being to be pissed off”
― Eric Bogosian, subUrbia

“I'm not ready to let the youthful part of myself go yet. If maturity means becoming a cynic, if you have to kill the part of yourself that is naive and romantic and idealistic - the part of you that you treasure most - to claim maturity, is it not better to die young but with your humanity intact?”
― Kenneth Cain, Emergency Sex: And Other Desperate Measures

“Idealisme adalah kemewahan terakhir yang hanya dimiliki oleh pemuda.”
― Tan Malaka

“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

“God save me from idealists.”
― Jim Butcher, Grave Peril

“Anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today.”
― Ayn Rand

“They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my childlike faith in practical politics.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“I am an absurd idealist. But I believe that all that must come true. For, unless it comes true, the world will be laid desolate. And I believe that it can come true. I believe that, by the grace of God, men will awake presently and be men again, and colour and laughter and splendid living will return to a grey civilisation. But that will only come true because a few men will believe in it, and fight for it, and fight in its name against everything that sneers and snarls at that ideal.”
― Leslie Charteris, The Last Hero

“Industry, technology, and commerce can thrive only as long as an idealistic national community offers the necessary preconditions. And these do not lie in material egoism, but in a spirit of sacrifice and joyful renunciation.”
― Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

“See the exquisite contrast of the types of mind! The pragmatist clings to facts and concreteness, observes truth at its work in particular cases, and generalises. Truth, for him, becomes a class-name for all sorts of definite working-values in experience. For the rationalist it remains a pure abstraction, to the bare name of which we must defer. When the pragmatist undertakes to show in detail just why we must defer, the rationalist is unable to recognise the concretes from which his own abstraction is taken. He accuses us of denying truth; whereas we have only sought to trace exactly why people follow it and always ought to follow it. Your typical ultra-abstractions fairly shudders at concreteness: other things equal, he positively prefers the pale and spectral. If the two universes were offered, he would always choose the skinny outline rather than the rich thicket of reality. It is so much purer, clearer, nobler.”
― William James, Pragmatism and Other Writings

“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.”
― Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New

“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

“You can use your idealism to further your aims, if you realize that nothing is Nirvana, nothing is perfect.”
― Jon Stewart

“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!”
― Eça de Queirós, The Mandarin and Other Stories by Eca De Queiroz

“Everyone is so cynical about the possibility of democracy today. But not me, I’m an idealist: democracy isn’t possible outside my own mind. According to my perceptions, this is a dictatorship.”
― Benson Bruno

“This is an inevitable and easily recognizable stage in every revolutionary movement: reformers must expect to be disowned by those who are only too happy to enjoy what has been won for them.”
― Doris Lessing

“That glorious vision of doing good is so often the sanguine mirage of so many good minds.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“When that time come, nobody will care for each other.
You don't have to prove me wrong, you'll need that energy.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“As long as your ideas of what's possible are limited by what's actual, no other idea has a chance.”
― Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists

“Whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man's nature and of life's potential.”
― Ayn Rand

“But he had always believed in fighting for the underdog, against the top dog. He had learned it, not from The Home, or The School, or The Church, but from that fourth and other great moulder of social conscience, The Movies. From all those movies that had begun to come out when Roosevelt went in.

He had been a kid back then, a kid who had not been on the bum yet, but he was raised up on all those movies that they made then, the ones that were between '32 and '37 and had not yet degenerated into commercial imitations of themselves like the Dead End Kid perpetual series that we have now. He had grown up with them, those movies like the every first Dead End, like Winternet, like Grapes Of Wrath, like Dust Be My Destiny, and those other movies starring John Garfield and the Lane girls, and the on-the-bum and prison pictures starring James Cagney and George Raft and Henry Fonda.”
― James Jones, From Here to Eternity