That glorious vision of doing good is so often the sanguine mirage of so many good minds. — Charles Dickens Copy Share Image
In a weird kind of way, music has afforded me an idealism and perfectionism that I could never attain as me. — Billy Corgan Copy Share Image
Pursuit of the approximate can conclude. Not so pursuit of the absolute. — Mason Cooley Copy Share Image
“A man is always devoted to something more tangible than a woman - the idea of her.” — Bauvard Copy Share Image
Set-backs in efforts to implement an ideal do not prove that the ideal is wrong... — Dag Hammarskjold Copy Share Image
Ideals are great in theory ... but they don't work too well in real life. — Laurell K. Hamilton Copy Share Image
The Church needs your faith, your idealism and your generosity, so that she can always be young in the Spirit. — Pope Benedict XVI Copy Share Image
“I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are good people and bad people. You're wrong, of course.… — Terry Pratchett Copy Share Image
I think a lot of people start out full of idealism and fresh ideas. And then a lot of times, being re-elected… — Matt Salmon Copy Share Image
“...in one hundred years we have lost the best human virtues of the nineteenth century: fervent idealism and the primacy of feeling:… — Gabriel García Márquez Copy Share Image
Idealistic reformers are dangerous because their idealism has no roots in love, but is simply a hysterical and unbalanced rage for order… — William Irwin Thompson Copy Share Image
“There is something that mankind can never destroy in spite of an unreasoning will to destruction, and this is its own idealism,… — Radclyffe Hall Copy Share Image
It's time for greatness - not for greed. It's a time for idealism - not ideology. It is a time not just… — Marian Wright Edelman Copy Share Image
We remain in the Romantic cycle initiated by Rousseau: liberal idealism canceled by violence, barbarism, disillusionment and cynicism. — Camille Paglia Copy Share Image
It is curious that Christianity, which is idealism, is sturdily defended by the brokers, and steadily attacked by the idealists. — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
That has been my entire life story. Running against the current and running with the current. Sometimes running with the current is… — Rem Koolhaas Copy Share Image
I always used to suffer a great deal if I let myself get too close to reality since the definitive world of… — Angela Carter Copy Share Image
Americans admire a people who can scratch a desert and produce a garden. The Israelis have shown qualities that Americans identify with:… — Richard M. Nixon Copy Share Image
“Idealism is a most potent medicine for these self-created mental diseases. It will successfully drive away devils and spirits that frequent ignorant… — Kaiten Nukariya Copy Share Image
“You know, the whole thing about perfectionism. The perfectionism is very dangerous. Because of course if your fidelity to perfectionism is too… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Idealists are people who believe in the potential of human nature for transformation. . . . The most essential attribute of human… — M. Scott Peck Copy Share Image
Has Bill Clinton inspired idealism in the young, as he himself was inspired by John F. Kennedy? Or has he actually reduced… — Arlie Russell Hochschild Copy Share Image
“Lying increases the creative faculties, expands the ego, lessens the friction of social contacts. It is only in lies, wholeheartedly and bravely… — Clare Boothe Luce Copy Share Image
“In the end idealism annoyed Bouvard. ‘I don’t want any more of it: the famous cogito is a bore. The ideas of… — Gustave Flaubert Copy Share Image
I shared a vagrant optimism that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that… — Hunter S. Thompson Copy Share Image
I'm not talking about blind optimism, the kind of hope that just ignores the enormity of the tasks ahead or the roadblocks… — Barack Obama Copy Share Image
I think utopianism and eschatology are really two sides of the same coin. They both assume that some massively transformative event is… — Phillip Sandifer Copy Share Image
“The debacle in Iraq has reinforced the realist dictum, disparaged by idealists in the 1990s, that the legacies of geography, history and… — Robert D. Kaplan Copy Share Image
There is an idealism associated with poetry I would not dispel but question. It doesn't change anything except within. It shifts your… — C.D. Wright Copy Share Image
“Modern man, brought up on Kantian idealism, regards nature as being no more than an outcome of the laws of the mind.… — Étienne Gilson Copy Share Image
Ideals are very often formed in the effort to escape from the hard task of dealing with facts, which is the function… — William Graham Sumner Copy Share Image
We are a purely idealistic Nation but let no one confuse our idealism with weakness. — Jimmy Carter Copy Share Image
Mix idealism with realism and add hard work. This will often bring much more than you could ever hope for. — John Wooden Copy Share Image
Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness. — Sidney Hook Copy Share Image
“Sometimes it's only the young ones who are crazy enough to change the world.” — Diana Peterfreund Copy Share Image
Idealism in the young, I guess I'm saying, is curiosity as well as goodness trying to express itself. — Dorothy Day Copy Share Image
“You were so beautiful when you were young. So much idealism it was inspiring.” — Miguel Syjuco Copy Share Image
The young habitually mistake lust for love, they're infested with idealism of all kinds. — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
