#idealism

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 to other parts. ↗

— B.R. Ambedkar

#society #change

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 man will never change his environment; for he will always change his mind. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#heaven #idealism #progress #change

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

#optimism #realists #courage

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

#idealism #maturity #dreams

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. ↗

— Kazuo Ishiguro

#conflict #enlightenment #family #harmony #idealism

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

— Bertrand Russell

#cooking #fragrance #humor #idealism #metaphors

To try to reform all the power structures at once would leave us with no power structure to use in our project. In any case, we will be able to see that absolute moral renewal could be attempted only by an absolute power and that a tyrannous force such as this must destroy the whole moral life of man, not renew it. ↗

— Michael Polanyi

#tyranny #life

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

#idealism #cynicism

Americans have been remarkably devoted to the capacity for belief, to idealism. That's why we get into trouble all the time. We're always viewed as naive. ↗

— A. Bartlett Giamatti

#been #belief #capacity #devoted #get

Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality, the costs become prohibitive. ↗

— William F. Buckley, Jr.

#become #costs #fine #idealism #prohibitive