Idealist Quotes - Page 6

• You are the most dangerous kind of female the world can ever know. You carry the seeds for your own destruction and the destruction of everyone who loves you. And a great many will love you for your beautiful face for your seductive body; but you will fail them all because you will believe they all fail you first. You are an idealist of the worst kind - the romantic idealist. Born to destroy and self destruct.

  Virginia C. Andrews

  Beautiful, Believe, Love You

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• The Minimalists are idealist. They want to minimise themselves in favour of the ideal. But I just can't. You see, my paintings are not cool. ... I'm very careful not to have ideas, because they're inaccurate.

  Agnes Martin

  Ideas, Favour, Want

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• That's why you go into architecture - at least I did - to do things for people. I think most of us are idealists. You start out that way, anyway.

  Frank Gehry

  Thinking, People, Way

  Interview with David Sheff, www.playboy.com. March 1, 2011.

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• I'm a great believer in compromise. I know it's not popular among young idealists.

  Amos Oz

  Compromise, Young, Believer

  "'Everybody comes from somewhere.' An Interview with Writer Amos Oz". Interview with Prashanth Ramakrishna, logger.believermag.com. October 20, 2016.

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• How many people in the pews know that [ Jonathan Edwards] is both a founder of evangelicalism and, say, an idealist who denied that the material world exists?

  Oliver D. Crisp

  People, World, Founders

  Source: edwardsstudies.com

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• In fact in politics, sometimes the thing that will never happen actually starts to happen. And there have to be people who hold out for that, and who accept that they are idealists and that they are operating on principle as opposed to realpolitik.

  Judith Butler

  People, Principles, Facts

  Source: www.opendemocracy.net

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• I'm still basically an idealist, which translates into getting real things done to make people's lives better.

  Charles Schumer

  Real, People, Done

  Source: www.questia.com

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• A state department official once told me this about the role of the president. He said: "We wage war for realist reasons, we justify wars for idealist reasons, and it's the president's job to balance the two." I agree.

  Michael Hastings

  War, Balance, President

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I don't think I'm an idealist. I'm a realist. And I see the progress. The progress has been remarkable. Look at the emancipation of woman in my lifetime. You're sitting here as a female. Look what's happened to the same-sex marriages. To tell somebody a man can become a woman, a woman can become a man, and a man can marry a man, they would have said, "You're crazy." But it's a reality today. So the world is changing. And you shouldn't - you know - be despairing because it's never happened before. Nothing new ever happened before.

  Benjamin B. Ferencz

  Crazy, Reality, Men

  Source: www.cbsnews.com

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• The radical ideas of one generation have become the common sense of the next. We all stand on the shoulders of earlier generations of reformers, radicals, and idealists who challenged the status quo of their day. They helped change America by organizing movements, pushing for radical reforms, popularizing progressive ideas, and spurring others to action.

  Peter Dreier

  Common Sense, Action, Progressive

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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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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• I'm a great believer in compromise. I know it's not popular among young idealists. Compromise is not popular. It's not at all popular among young people who these days call themselves "activists." They think compromises are dishonest, opportunistic, humiliating. Not in my vocabulary. In my vocabulary, the word "compromise" is synonymous to the word "life".

  Amos Oz

  Thinking, People, Compromise

  Source: logger.believermag.com

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• In Yugoslavia we were told we were not only naive idealists in wanting war criminals to be prosecuted but that we were actually standing in the way of a ceasefire which would save more lives. The idea was that, by giving amnesty to these ruthless warmongers, you would give them an incentive to stop killing. I found that incredibly naive, never mind cynical. Having been on the ground and having met with these ruthless killers, I knew the only thing they understood was the language of force.

  Payam Akhavan

  War, Giving, Cynical

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• I say let's be idealists. "Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not yet see" (Hebrews 11:1).

  Shane Claiborne

  Hebrew, Certain

  "Plotting goodness together: An interview with Shane Claiborne". Interview with Jonathan Merritt, religionnews.com. May 22, 2013.

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• Men can absent themselves from real life for their art more easily. Women are anchored into the quotidian business of getting food on the table, making sure everybody's socks match, the soccer gear is ready. I admire idealists, but they're usually enabled by someone who holds the tether on their balloon, who pays the bills and sweeps up after them.

  Geraldine Brooks

  Soccer, Art, Real

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• When I see the mostly young people of Occupy Wall Street - a mixture of the bored, the nihilistic, the seekers of excitement, the left-wing true believers, the confused idealists and those hoping to engage in violence - railing against the rich capitalists on Wall Street, I get worried. Because the hatred they express toward the rich is similar to that expressed against the rich by Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. Of course, these people are not comparable to those killers. But class hatred must lead to bad things. That is why President Obama is playing with fire with his attacks on the rich.

  Dennis Prager

  Wall, Confused, Class

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• Anyone too undisciplined, too self-righteous or too self-centered to live in the world as it is has a tendency to idealize a world which ought to be. But no matter what political or religious direction such idealists choose, their visions always share one telling characteristic: in their utopias, heavens or brave new worlds, their greatest personal weakness suddenly appears to be a strength.

  David James Duncan

  Religious, Brave New World, Self

  David James Duncan (2010). “The Brothers K”, p.320, Dial Press

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• I heard somebody open and shut the gate to the barn lot, but I didn't look around. If I didn't look around it would not be true that somebody had opened the gate with the creaky hinges, and that is a wonderful principle for a man to get hold of... What you don't know know don't hurt you, for it ain't real. They called that Idealism in my book I had when I was in college, and after I got hold of that principle I became an Idealist... If you are an Idealist it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway.

  Robert Penn Warren

  Hurt, Real, Book

  Robert Penn Warren (2006). “All the King's Men”, p.45, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Now I call myself a bleeding heart libertarian. Because I do believe in the principles of Libertarianism as an ideal - because I'm an idealist.

  Neil Peart

  Believe, Heart, Principles

  "Q&A: Neil Peart On Rush's New LP and Being a 'Bleeding Heart Libertarian'". Interview with Andy Greene, www.rollingstone.com. June 12, 2012.

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• I have never been an idealist - that implies you aren't going to achieve something.

  Arthur Scargill

  Achieve, Idealism

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• Contrasting British servicemen and women with the appeasers, it is hard not to laugh. Are these two sides even the same species, let alone the same nationality? On one hand the selflessness and internationalism of the soldiers; on the other the Whites-First isolationism of the protesters. Excuse me, who are the idealists here?

  Julie Burchill

  Hands, Two Sides, Laughing

  "Don't take my name in vain" by Julie Burchill, www.theguardian.com. March 28, 2013.

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• One way of saying that is that there is an objective reality beyond our mind. A way to think of this in a philosophic sense is to look between the two great extremes: the idealist philosophy that says mind and consciousness is the only thing and that matter is simply an illusion, or a Maya, the product of mind; and the other extreme, a strict materialist determinism, which says that mind and consciousness is a secondary phenomenon of the collision of matter.

  Edgar Mitchell

  Philosophy, Thinking, Reality

  Source: www.edgemagazine.net

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• When I was younger, I was somewhat of an idealist. I guess I'm a little bit more of a realist now. I think there's a lot that can be done to make the world a better place, but it's more about choosing your battles.

  Conor Oberst

  Thinking, Battle, Done

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• I've never understood the division between so-called realists and so-called idealists.

  Hillary Clinton

  Division, Realist, Understood

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• The cynic finds love with the idealist. The rebel with the conformist. The social butterfly with the bookworm. They help each other balance their lives.

  Joyce Brothers

  Butterfly, Finding Love, Balance

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