#idealism

By concentrating on what is good in people, by appealing to their idealism and their sense of justice, and by asking them to put their faith in the future, socialists put themselves at a severe disadvantage. ↗

— Ian Mcewan

#asking #concentrating #disadvantage #faith #future

Idealism that makes no distinction between areas where our national interest lies and those from which it is remote does no good for America. The weariness of the post-Versailles, post-Korea, post-Vietnam eras is never far from the national mood. ↗

— Dick Morris

#areas #between #distinction #does #eras

In brief, egoism in its modern interpretation, is the antithesis, not of altruism, but of idealism. ↗

— John Buchanan Robinson

#antithesis #brief #egoism #idealism #interpretation

If you didn't have some sense of idealism, then what is there to sustain you? ↗

— James Carville

#sense #some #sustain #then #you

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

— Ayn Rand

#philosophy #life

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 many abstractions, figments of the imagination. As for God, it is impossible to know how he is, or even if he is! Once he was the cause of wind, thunder, revolutions. Now he is getting smaller. Besides, I don’t see what use he is. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#god #idealism #language #religion #spirituality

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

— Charles Dickens

#procrastination #procrastination

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 system could be reformed. ↗

— CrimethInc.

#journalism #lawyers #reporters #love

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 that, by the grace of God, men will awake presently and be men again, and colour and laughter and splendid living will return to a grey civilisation. But that will only come true because a few men will believe in it, and fight for it, and fight in its name against everything that sneers and snarls at that ideal. ↗

— Leslie Charteris

#inspirational #war #inspirational

At present, our country needs women's idealism and determination, perhaps more in politics than anywhere else. ↗

— Shirley Chisholm

#country #determination #else #idealism #more