Idealist Quotes - Page 6

• I used to think if it wasn't possible to be a family man and a totally dedicated artist, I'd rather be the former. I'm an idealist and a romantic.

  Charlton Heston

  Artist, Men, Thinking

  "Charlton Heston: Great sport with a line in heroic role models". "The Sunday Times" Newspaper, June 17, 1990.

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• None of this is fair to you. And should it continue, it will make it more difficult to keep attracting the kind of driven, patriotic, idealist Americans to public service that our citizens deserved and that our system of self-government demands.

  Barack Obama

  Patriotic, Government, Self

  "Partisan-in-chief Obama – crossing the line with America's federal workforce" By Tony Shaffer, www.foxnews.com. October 03, 2013.

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• An idealist who couldn't cope becomes cynical.

  Amy Ray

  Cynical

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• Success is achieved by people who deeply understand reality and know how to use it to get what they want. The converse is also true: idealists who are not well-grounded in reality create problems, not progress.

  Ray Dalio

  Life, Reality, People

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• It is curious that Christianity, which is idealism, is sturdily defended by the brokers, and steadily attacked by the idealists.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Christian, Curious, Idealism

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2014). “The Heart of Emerson's Journals”, p.263, Courier Corporation

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• Wives invariably flourish when deserted; ... it is the deserting male, the reckless idealist rushing about the world seeking a non-existent felicity, who often ends in disaster.

  William McFee

  Rushing, Wife, Infidelity

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• You Europeans know nothing about America. Because we amass large fortunes you think we care for nothing but money. We are nothing for it; the moment we have it we spend it, sometimes well, sometimes ill, but we spend it. Money is nothing to us; it's merely the symbol of success. We are the greatest idealists in the world; I happen to think that we've set our ideal on the wrong objects; I happen to think that the greatest ideal man can set before himself is self-perfection.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Men, Thinking, America

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• If you are not an idealist by the time you are twenty you have no heart, but if you are still an idealist by the time you are thirty, you don't have a head.

  Randolph Bourne

  Heart, Twenties, Thirty

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• I'm still a bit of a romantic and an idealist and hopelessly naive.

  Brit Marling

  Stills, Naive, Bits

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• Some people are pragmatists, taking things as they come and making the best of the choices available. Some people are idealists, standing for principle and refusing to compromise. And some people just act on any whim that enters their heads. I pragmatically turn my whims into principles.

  Bill Watterson

  People, Choices, Principles

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• A cynic should never marry an idealist. For the cynic, marriage represents the welcome end of romantic life, with all its agony and ecstasy. But for the idealist, it is only the beginning.

  Julie Burchill

  Agony, Welcome, Cynicism

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• When people who are seeking change start out, they are driven by commitment to a cause. But as internecine power struggles take over, one-time idealists fall prey to corruption. They become just as corrupt and manipulative as the system that they want to overthrow.

  Anurag Kashyap

  Struggle, Fall, Commitment

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• Man's indecency to man all over the world rules out the idea of humanity as an actuality. It is a dream of young idealists. In practice a misnomer

  Errol Flynn

  Dream, Wisdom, Men

  Errol Flynn, Jeffrey Meyers (2002). “My Wicked, Wicked Ways: The Autobiography of Errol Flynn”, p.410, Rowman & Littlefield

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• A strong man must be militant as well as moderate. He must be a realist as well as an idealist.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Strong, Men, Realist

  Source: www.thedailybeast.com

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• Ideas first and last: yet it is not till these are formulated and utilized that the devotees of the common sense discern their value and advantages. The idealist is the capitalist on whose resources multitudes are maintained life long. Ideas in the head set hands about their several tasks, thus carrying forward all human endeavors to their issues.

  Amos Bronson Alcott

  Hands, Ideas, Issues

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• People will say I'm an idealist. I hope so.

  A. Bartlett Giamatti

  People

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• I don't consider myself a cynic. I think of myself as a skeptic and a realist. But I understand the word "cynic" has more than one meaning, and I see how I could be seen as cynical. "George, you're cynical." Well, you know, they say if you scratch a cynic you find a disappointed idealist. And perhaps the flame still flickers a little, you know?

  George Carlin

  Thinking, Cynical, Realist

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• Our idealists must own that their velleity to abolish all suffering is most fully expressed in the Fifth Wisdom of Lamaism, the doctrine that teaches that "no durable happiness, nor yet security, for any sentient being can exist while others are a prey to suffering." That truth cannot be questioned and you may take it to heart: in practical terms it means we got ourselves born on the wrong planet - in the wrong universe.

  Revilo P. Oliver

  Heart, Mean, Suffering

  "On the Roof of the World". "Liberty Bell" Magazine, December 1987.

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• [I]n contrast to the common belief that they are the world's greatest cynics, the best journalists are the world's great idealists. They have experienced firsthand the great soothing balance of human existence. For every disgrace there is triumph, for every wrong there is a moment of justice, for every funeral a wedding, for every obituary a birth announcement.

  Anna Quindlen

  Justice, Funeral, Balance

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• Jesus, in fact, was typical of a certain kind of fanatical young idealist: at one moment holding forth, with tears in his eyes, about the need for universal love; at the next, furiously denouncing the morons, crooks and bigots who did not see eye to eye with him. It is very natural and very human behaviour. But it is not superhuman.

  Margaret E. Knight

  Jesus, Eye, Tears

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• [Some] people really expect the passion of love to fill and gratify every need of life, whereas nature only intended that it should meet one of many demands. They insist on making it stand for all the emotional pleasures of life and art; expecting an individual and self-limited passion to yield infinite variety, pleasure, and distraction, and to contribute to their lives what the arts and the pleasurable exercise of the intellect gives to less limited and less intense idealists.

  Willa Cather

  Art, Passion, Exercise

  Willa Cather (2013). “The Essential Willa Cather Collection”, p.331, eBookIt.com

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• First, I was an idealist (that was early - fools are born, not made, you know); next I was a realist; now I am a pessimist, and, by Jove! if things get much worse I'll become a humorist.

  Ellen Glasgow

  Next, Fool, Firsts

  Ellen Glasgow (1900). “The Descendant”

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• Our dreams of bringing the whole of human history under the control of the human will are ironically refuted by the fact that no group of idealists can easily move the pattern of history toward the desired goal of peace and justice. The recalcitrant forces in the historical drama have a power and persistence beyond our reckoning.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Dream, Drama, Moving

  Reinhold Niebuhr (2015). “Reinhold Niebuhr: Major Works on Religion and Politics: (Library of America #263)”, p.551, Library of America

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• Im still an idealist. My manager is always trying to talk me out of it, but thats just the way I am.

  Ariel Rechtshaid

  Always Trying, Stills, Managers

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• Honor to the idealists, whether philosophers or poets. They have improved us by mingling with our daily pursuits great and transcendent conceptions. They have thrown around our sensual life the grandeur of a better, and drawn us up from contacts with the temporal and the selfish to communion with beauty and truth and goodness.

  Edwin Hubbel Chapin

  Selfish, Sensual, Honor

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