I prefer true over happy now.

He wanted to toast mad idealism, forbidden desires, the dreams that drove one to criminal acts. He wanted, quite starkly, oblivion.

Mothers do not have love affairs. Before their children they have dreams, and after their children they have delusions. If the father is involved somewhere, they have fantasies.

The scene [Bruegel’s ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’] is filled with a vast field, and a cow and a farmer plowing. In the left-hand corner is a tiny ocean the size of a palm,...

Realism arises from the maturity of the minds, while Idealism arises from their conformity.

If you ask me, my ideal would be the society based on liberty, equality and fraternity. An ideal society should be mobile and full of channels of conveying a change taking place in one part...

Idealism, though just in its premises, and often daring and honest in their application, is stultified by the exclusive intellectualism of its own methods: by its fatal trust in the squirrel-work of the industrious brain...

the real is coherent and probable because it is real, and not real because it is coherent…

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...

Let’s always try to paint the truth … our art must be made to mean something.

When the business man rebukes the idealism of his office-boy, it is commonly in some such speech as this: “Ah, yes, when one is young, one has these ideals in the abstract and these castles...

People change, though, especially after they are dead.

She had dealt with her pregnancy by wrapping herself in dreams.

Are we truly committed to the notion that ideals and values vary and alter in accordance with changing conditions? Should we not question such a relativistic dogma? Is not the degree of our sensitivity to...

Modern man, brought up on Kantian idealism, regards nature as being no more than an outcome of the laws of the mind. Losing all their independence as divine works, things gravitate henceforth round human thought,...

Nice people don’t necessarily fall in love with nice people.

You’re the medium Weed and I use to communicate, that’s all, this set of holes, pleasantly framed, this little femme scampering back and forth with scented messages tucked in her little secret places.”She was too...

Sometimes it’s best to trade an ideal for something more practical that you can guarantee.

I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones...

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...

The debacle in Iraq has reinforced the realist dictum, disparaged by idealists in the 1990s, that the legacies of geography, history and culture really do set limits on what can be accomplished in any given...

Lincoln, considering a Cabinet nominee: “He is a Radical without the petulance and fretfulness of many radicals.

As long as the vision of heaven is always changing, the vision of earth will be exactly the same. No ideal will remain long enough to be realized, or even partly realized. The modern young...

We human beings glimpse lofty ideals, catch ourselves betraying them, and sink to suicidal despair–despair from which only the love of our friends can save us, since friends see in us those nobler qualities we...

I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are good people and bad people. You’re wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are...

History knows no scruples and no hesitation. Inert and unnering flows towards her goal. History knows herway. She makes no mistakes.

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.

The more idealism proves futile, the more I respect idealists.

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.

Culture is the study of perfection, and the constant effort to achieve it.

Sometimes it’s only the young ones who are crazy enough to change the world.

Imagine there’s no countriesIt isn’t hard to doNothing to kill or die forAnd no religion tooImagine all the peopleLiving life in peaceYou may say that I’m a dreamerBut I’m not the only oneI hope someday...

Blogging, writing conventional articles, and being science consultant and pocket protector ninja to various web portals and TV programs, quite often trying to promote the penicillin of hard data to people who had no interest...

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.

Being Jewish did not compromise the humanitarian and universalist ideals of my close relatives who, having experienced persecution close hand, were more concerned with bringing about peace, justice and equality in the world than in...

If Feingold does it, if he wins this race in this year, it will not be as just another Democratic senator. It will not be as a maverick, nor even as an idealist. It will...

I prefer truth-based entertaining idealism.

The girl looks out the window, watching the gentle, familiar blue sky fade into darkness. The stars come out, slowly at first and then all together, diamond-bright, each one a new world to discover.But no...

He had volunteered early, rather than waiting to be conscripted, for he felt a duty and an obligation to serve, and believed that … being willing to fight for his country and the liberty it...

People don’t want children to know what they need to know. They want their kids to know what they ought to need to know. If you’re a teacher you’re in a constant battle with mildly...

It’s idealistic, it’s for love and gentleness, it’s close to nature, it hurts nobody, it’s voluntary. I can’t see anything wrong with any of that.”Neither can I. The only trouble is, this commune will be...

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.

Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths?

Though I myself am an atheist, I openly profess religion in the sense just mentioned, that is, a nature religion. I hate the idealism that wrenches man out of nature; I am not ashamed of...

As sometimes happens with men who wish to fight but do not or cannot, Reagan developed a romantic image of the military.

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...

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.