That glorious vision of doing good is so often the sanguine mirage of so many good minds.

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...

There was only one guy in the whole Bible Jesus ever personally promised a place with him in Paradise. Not Peter, not Paul, not any of those guys. He was a convicted thief, being executed....

One great function of the arts is to keep ideals alive in a culture that does not yet realize them.

Liberalism itself has failed, and for a pretty good reason. It has been too often compromised by the people who represented it.

In reality the universe has no geometry.

Reality is what people who lack vision see.

…After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world. I am strongly of the opinion that the great majority...

If you are truly convinced that there is some solution to all human problems, that one can conceive an ideal society which men can reach if only they do what is necessary to attain it,...

What war did for him (hasten disillusionment with communism), childbirth did for me. I began to notice what neglected, neurotic waifs the children of Communists were and to question the genuineness of the love of...

In order to succeed we need leaders of inspired idealism, leaders to whom are granted great visions, who dream greatly and strive to make their dreams come true; who can kindle the people with the...

In a world where women are commodities, a woman who refuses to sell herself will have the thing she refuses to sell taken away from her by force

I can’t bear the thought that a man of lofty mind and heart begins with the ideal of the Madonna and ends with the ideal of Sodom.

Every Anglophile has his own private England which is, of course, unrecognizable to the English.

Idealisme adalah kemewahan terakhir yang hanya dimiliki oleh pemuda.

The idealist hopes. The romantic sees doom. The postmodernist sees doom and hopes.

My generation failed to change the world, but at least I did not let the world change me.

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...

A realist is a slave to reality.

The real battlefield is the realm of ideas.

Why has he taken this job?… For the sake of the dogs? But the dogs are dead; and what do dogs know of honour and dishonour anyway? For himself then. For his idea of the...

If you have realistic ideals and can generally live up to them, your self-esteem will not be threatened. If your ideals are exaggerated and you cannot reach them, your good feelings from successes may be...

The decision as to whether to risk one’s actual life or to surrender the ideal self-conception is a decision about who one is.(from The structure of desire and recognition)

People are creators. But I doubt that many realize this. We are not meant to go out into the world and find flawless things, we are not meant to sit down and have flawless things...

We’ve already had Malthus, the friend of humanity. But the friend of humanity with shaky moral principles is the devourer of humanity, to say nothing of his conceit; for, wound the vanity of any one...

masculine” traits of learning. Famous romantic writers such as Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Hazlitt criticized the bluestockings. …and Hazlitt declared his ‘utter aversion to Bluestockingism … I do not care a fig...

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...

A man is always devoted to something more tangible than a woman – the idea of her.

I think this was a nice idea we had in this country and a nice landscape to experiment with. But I think there comes a time in almost any experimentation or idea, where you have...

The late 1920s were an age of islands, real and metaphorical. They were an age when Americans by thousands and tens of thousands were scheming to take the next boat for the South Seas or...

To put a dreamer in their place isn’t dreaming.

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...

Curious that a man as selfish as he should be offering himself to the service of dead dogs. There must be other, more productive ways of giving oneself to the world, or to an idea...

You see, Risa, survival is a dance between our needs and our consciences. When the need is great enough, and the music loud enough, we can stomp conscience into the ground.’Risa closes her eyes. She...

I have always thought that foreign-policy idealism has to be tempered with realism.

Bravery usually looked stupid from the outside.

But for a long time, and probably far too long, I had a secret wish: the adolescently romantic idea that there was someone out there for me; someone I hadn’t met yet who would ask...

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.

The Gospel worldview equips the artist with a unique combination of optimism and realism about life.

I lost something magical in the process of growing up – my disillusionment.

Countless generations have set out convinced that they would succeed where other had failed – that’s where lawyers and reporters come from, you know. They’re the cynical corpses of idealistic young people who thought the...

In the fluid world of 1919, it was possible to dream of great change, or have nightmares about the collapse of order.

It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist’s life is that he cannot realize his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realize their ideal...

Cynics are – beneath it all – only idealists with awkwardly high standards.

You know, the whole thing about perfectionism. The perfectionism is very dangerous. Because of course if your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything. Because doing anything results in…it’s actually kind of...

It’s always the lesser of two evils.”I don’t see why there have to be any evils at all.’-Connor

I do not care a fig for any woman that knows even what an author means.

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...

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...

I prefer true over happy now.