Rereading Candide, I was struck by the link between optimism and the optimal, the idea that we have been placed in this optimal world rather than some other.
I'm asking the American people to rise above the noise and the clutter of our broken politics.
I think I have more optimism than they do and I think I have a better vision for the country than [Barack and Michelle Obama] do and I think it's a nasty statement. In actuality, it doesn't pertain to me.
If you listen to Barack Obama, if you listen to Hillary Clinton, they're portraying Donald Trump as this deep, dark, dividing, dank presence that sees America as dwindling away and failing and everybody's in bad shape. They think they're the paragons of optimism.
I think optimism is in the eyes of the beholder.
Yet optimism is in order, because day by day democracy is proving itself to be a not-at-all-fragile flower. From Stettin on the Baltic to Varna on the Black Sea, the regimes planted by totalitarianism have had more than 30 years to establish their legitimacy. But none - not one regime - has yet been able to risk free elections. Regimes planted by bayonets do not take root.
I think optimism and humour are key words for me to make the films accessible, which means they can really travel and be seen by as many people as possible.
Even as considering African-Americans, immigrants and other groups who may be marginalized in different ways, American Muslims are still one of the most marginalized groups. Overt prejudice is probably more acceptable toward American Muslims than any other single group in the U.S. There is still a lot of policies in place that are incredibly effective that don't show any signs of eroding. So, I don't want to overstate the optimism but I think things are headed gradually in the right direction. Just because of the distance between us and 9/11.
Our Christian faith - and correlatively, our account of apologetics - is tainted by modernism when we fail to appreciate the effects of sin on reason. When this is ignored, we adopt an Enlightenment optimism about the role of a supposedly neutral reason in the recognition of truth.
I always admired Walt's optimism. He seemed to know the direction he was going to. When I was at the studio, I remember he kept driving all of us back down to a more fundamental level all the time.
Over the course of the years, I've learned [that] fashion is a fascinating business about selling magic. It is done on the backs of our optimism and our insecurity. It is as much psychology as commerce. But I've also learned that every day we make split second decisions about people based on their attire and those decisions can have powerful implications - see the story of Trayvon Martin and his hoodie. It's important for us to understand how fashion works and how we connect to it.
The dreams of the 1960s began to disappear in the 1970s. The economy collapsed, and so did the optimism of the Metabolists.
The market is a pendulum that forever swings between unsustainable optimism (which makes stocks too expensive) and unjustified pessimism (which makes them too cheap). The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.
Germany has always stood for an E.U. of the 27 countries. But in light of Britain's continued resistance to further integration steps, as we saw with the fiscal pact, there are limits to my optimism in this regard. It's quite possible that we will have to create the new institutions for the euro zone first.
Though nihilism has been relentlessly criticized for overemphasizing the dark side of human experience, it might be equally true that this overemphasis represents a needed counterbalance to shallow optimism and arrogant confidence in human power. Nihilism reminds us that we are not gods, and that despite all of the accomplishments and wonders of civilization, humans cannot alter the fact that they possess only a finite amount of mastery and control over their own destinies.
Pathological Stubbornness and Irrational Optimism – Lessons I’ve learned on my entrepreneurial journey
Ontario’s colleges and universities offer our young people life-changing opportunities. With an education, you can go anywhere and do anything. I am so impressed with the way our postsecondary students are engaging in their communities, and I am inspired by their hope and optimism. They are not the leaders of tomorrow – they are leaders today.
Now, as never before, hundreds of millions of men and women-who had formerly believed that stoic resignation in the face of hunger and disease and darkness was the best one could could do-have come alive with a new sense that the means are at hand with which to make for themselves a better life.
A poet, any real poet, is simply an alchemist who transmutes his cynicism regarding human beings into an optimism regarding the moon, the stars, the heavens, and the flowers, to say nothing of Spring, love, and dogs.
[on the screenplay for "When Harry Met Sally"] It struck me that the movies had spent more than half a century saying, "They lived happily ever after" and the following quarter century warning that they'll be lucky to make it through the weekend. Possibly now we are now entering a third era in which the movies will be sounding a note of cautious optimism: You know, it just might work.
Religion should be disentangled as much as possible from history and authority and metaphysics, and made to rest honestly on one's fine feelings, on one's indomitable optimism and trust in life.
Hope and optimism have defined my political career, and I continue to be hopeful and optimistic about Canada. Young people have been a great source of inspiration for me.
We were that generation called silent, but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we shared the period's official optimism nor, as others thought, because we feared its official repression. We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man's fate.
Children, of course, don't understand at first that they are being cheated. They come to school with a degree of faith and optimism, and they often seem to thrive during the first few years. It is sometimes not until the third grade that their teachers start to see the warning signs of failure. By the fourth grade many children see it too.
Without wilderness, we will eventually lose the capacity to understand America. Our drive, our ruggedness, our unquenchable optimism and zeal and elan go back to the challenges of the untrammeled wilderness.
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