#idealism

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

God save me from idealists. ↗

— Jim Butcher

#idealism #thomas-raith #humor

As I have pointed out, it is the Christian tradition that is the most fundamental element in Western culture. It lies at the base not only of Western religion, but also of Western morals and Western social idealism. ↗

— Christopher Dawson

#base #christian #christian tradition #culture #element

The enemy of idealism is zealotry. ↗

— Neil Kinnock

#idealism

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. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#criminals #god #good-and-bad #good-and-evil #heaven

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 place. But the experience in the Balkans reinforced an idealist dictum that is equally true: One should always work near the limits of what is possible rather than cynically give up on any place. In this decade idealists went too far; in the previous one, it was realists who did not go far enough. ↗

— Robert D. Kaplan

#humanitarian-intervention #idealism #interventionism #iraq #noninterventionism

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. ↗

— Adolf Hitler

#principle #renunciation #sacrifice #spirit #thriving

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

— Mikhail Bakunin

#idealism #just #politics #thought #will

Whatever happened to a sense of idealism and embracing an idea that will help people and, in this case, children? ↗

— Rod Blagojevich

#children #embracing #happened #help #help people

What you have now is a Hollywood that is pure poison. Hollywood was a central place in the history of art in the 20th century: it was human idealism preserved. And then, like any great place, it collapsed, and it collapsed into the most awful machinery in the world. ↗

— Emir Kusturica

#any #art #awful #central #century