The reason I’m attracted to the light of Scripture is because there’s another side of me that is dark. The reason I am interested in men of peace is because I’m not like them and would like to be. I’m not someone in real life who turns the other cheek.

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.

We tend to take whatever’s worked in our particular set of circumstances (big family, small family, AP, Ezzo, home school, public school) and project that upon everyone else in the world as the ideal.

For even if we know very little that is certain about spirit or soul, the true nature of the body, of materiality, is totally unknown and incomprehensible to us.

Anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today.

I am often guilty of expecting the worst so as to avoid disappointment and welcome surprise.

I unconsciously decided that, even if it wasn’t an ideal world, it should be so and painted only the ideal aspects of it – pictures in which there are no drunken slatterns or self-centered mothers . . . only foxy grandpas who played baseball with kids and boys who fished from logs and got up...

I wouldn’t live in a colony like that, myself, for a thousand dollars an hour. I wouldn’t want it next door. I’m not too happy it’s within ten miles. Why? Because their soft-headedness irritates me. Because their beautiful thinking ignores both history and human nature. Because they’d spoil my thing with their thing. Because I...

At first I protested and rebelled against poetry. I was about to deny my poetic worlds. I was doing violence to my illusions with analysis, science, and learning Henry’s language, entering Henry’s world. I wanted to destroy by violence and animalism my tenuous fantasies and illusions and my hypersensitivity. A kind of suicide. The ignominy...

Something must be radically wrong with a culture and a civilisation when its youth begins to desert it. Youth is the natural time for revolt, for experiment, for a generous idealism that is eager for action. Any civilisation which has the wisdom of self-preservation will allow a certain margin of freedom for the expression of...

What makes Geoffrey Chaucer such compelling reading is his creation of a riveting conversation between the ideal and the everyday.

My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.

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!

In the end idealism annoyed Bouvard. ‘I don’t want any more of it: the famous cogito is a bore. The ideas of things are taken for the things themselves. What we barely understand is explained by means of words that we do not understand at all! Substance, extension, force, matter and soul, are all so...

Scratch the surface of most cynics and you find a frustrated idealist — someone who made the mistake of converting his ideals into expectations.

Whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man’s nature and of life’s potential.

It’s my duty as a human being to be pissed off

Man’s own youth is the world’s youth; at least, he feels as if it were, and imagines that the earth’s granite substance is something not yet hardened, and which he can mould into whatever shape he likes. So it was with Holgrave. He could talk sagely about the world’s old age, but never actually believed...

Once people said: Give me liberty or give me death. Now they say: Make me a slave, just pay me enough.

Rakyat yang nasionalis hendaknya belajar menghemat energi. Pemimpin dan pemerintahan yang nasionalis hendaknya memikirkan cara-cara penghematan, bukan mengeksploitas sisa sumber daya alam yang kita miliki. Kembangkan sistem transportasi massal yang memadai, sehingga jumlah kendaraan di jalan raya berkurang. Dengan sendirinya pemakaian bahan bakar akan berkurang.Hentikan pembangunan menara-menara perkantoran dan apartemen-apartemen tinggi di perkotaan. Biarlah penghijauan...

Too many moralists begin with a dislike of reality.

We must rekindle the fire of idealism in our society, for nothing suffocates the promise of America more than unbounded cynicism and indifference.

As long as your ideas of what’s possible are limited by what’s actual, no other idea has a chance.

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

Perhaps one day, all these conflicts will end, and it won’t be because of great statesmen or churches or organisations like this one. It’ll be because people have changed. They’ll be like you, Puffin. More a mixture. So why not become a mongrel? It’s healthy.

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...

Der Mensch kann tun was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will.Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.

Scratch any cynic and you will find a disappointed idealist.

Idealism is the despot of thought, just as politics is the despot of will.

Saya akan lebih mendulukan kebenaran-kebenaran universal, bukan hutang budi, bukan kewajiban moral dan bukan juga pengabdian buta.

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 one up out of these fragments. And all the time your soul is craving and longing for something else. And...

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. So don’t knock the guys on death row. Maybe they know something you don’t.

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 of people will always find these are the moving impulses of our life. But it is only those who do...

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, then you and your followers must believe that no price can be too high to pay in order to open...

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 mankind that didn’t begin at home.

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 fire from their own burning souls. The leader for the time being, whoever he may be, is but an instrument,...

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 moulder of social conscience, The Movies. From all those movies that had begun to come out when Roosevelt went in.He...

A realist is a slave to reality.

The real battlefield is the realm of ideas.