Idealistic People Quotes & Sayings

Americans ... are the most idealistic people in the whole world. Their only danger is that the idealist can easily become the idolator. — G.K. Chesterton

To undertake the direction of the economic life of people with widely divergent ideals and values is to assume responsibilities which commit one to the use of force; it is to assume a position where the best intentions cannot prevent one from being forced to act in a way which to some of those affected must appear highly immoral. This is true even if we assume the dominant power to be as idealistic and unselfish as we can possibly conceive. But how small is the likelihood that it will be unselfish, and how great are the temptations! — Friedrich August Von Hayek

It is inexcusable that the richest country in the world does not take care of all of its people. We don't consider ourselves idealistic; we're thoughtfully trying to make a beautiful health care model. — Patch Adams

It is the decisive people who have become civilised; it is the indecisive, otherwise called the higher sceptics, or the idealistic doubters, who have remained barbarians. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

Because I don't think it's very healthy to hold people to idealized views. I think that's a certain stage in life, something kids do. You have to go through that idealistic phase with your parents, but at a certain point, you need to see people as just people. — Joan Cusack

All politicians, even the most idealistic ones, are looking for money, sucking up to rich people. — Paul Theroux

It is this country that is dangerous, with her idealistic conception of legality. The social spirit of this people is wrapped up in scrupulous prejudices and that is fatal to our work.. You talk of England being our only refuge! So much the worse. What do we want with refuges ? Here you talk, print, plot, and do nothing. — Joseph Conrad

An ethical idealist, a person whom embraces the honorable philosophy of ethical idealism, performs acts that are honest, pure, and righteous regardless of their fearfulness. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Sometimes people call me an idealist. Well, that is the way I know I am an American. America is the only idealistic nation in the world. — Woodrow Wilson

Am I in love? Absolutely. I'm in love with ancient philosophers, foreign painters, classic authors, and musicians who have died long ago. I'm a passionate lover. I fawn over these people. I have given them my heart and my soul. The trouble is, I'm unable to love anyone tangible. I have sacrificed a physical bond, for a metaphysical relationship. I am the ultimate idealistic lover. — James Dean

Idealistic? Ruddy stupid, if you'll pardon the language, miss,: Mr Roberts said. "All this talk about power for the people and down with the ruling classes and everyone should govern themselves. It can never happen, I told him. The ruling classes are born to rule. They know how to do it. You take a person like you or me and you put us up there to run a country and we'd make a ruddy mess of it. — Rhys Bowen

Like that timber wolf on the mountain he had a kind of animal courage. He went his own way with unconcern for consequences that sometimes stunned people, and stuns me now to hear about it. He did not often swerve to right or to left. I've discovered that. But this courage didn't arise from any idealistic idea of self-sacrifice, only from the intensity of his pursuit, and there was nothing noble about it. — Robert M. Pirsig

The second paragraph of the Declaration that is very much an expression of Jefferson's imagination. It envisions a perfect world, at last bereft of kings, priests, and even government itself. In this never-never land, free individuals interact harmoniously, all forms of political coercion are unnecessary because they have been voluntarily internalized, people pursue their own different versions of happiness without colliding, and some semblance of social equality reigns supreme. As Lincoln recognized, it is an ideal world that can never be reached on this earth, only approached. And each generation had an obligation to move America an increment closer to the full promise, as Lincoln most famously did. The American Dream, then, is the Jeffersonian Dream writ large, embedded in language composed during one of the most crowded and congested moments in American history by an idealistic young man who desperately wished to be somewhere else. — Joseph J. Ellis

I think a lot of people have an idealistic view - if you grow up in the country, there can't possibly be anything wrong with you. — PJ Harvey

The desire to experience new kinds of community led a number of thoughtful and idealistic people to reject the patterns of vocation, family life and religion with which they had grown up. Their attempt to establish new patterns of social bonding in uncontaminated rural retreats can be seen as a secular monasticism, but they often discovered that to abolish the boundaries of authority, family and property created a whole series of problems which they did not have the spiritual and personal resources to solve.

At their best, such groups have opened up new horizons of discipleship, but they have often learned some hard lessons about the intractable sinfulness and selfishness of partly-redeemed human nature. — Ian Breward

Some may think that to affirm dialogue - the encounter of women and men in the world in order to transform the world - is naively and subjectively idealistic. there is nothing, however, more real or concrete than people in the world and with the world, than humans with other humans. — Paulo Freire

Sad to say, in a present-day world that seems to be governed by clashing self
interests and material forces, where we have learned that idealistic rhetoric usually cloaks nationalistic purposes or even far more diabolical schemes, it has become increasingly difficult to explain collective actions that profess to be driven by virtuous ideals or a desire to make the world a better place. During the past century, various national leaders have ordered the slaughter of tens of millions of people as the supposedly necessary means to perfect the world. Today we are far more cynical, I fear, than the generations at the beginning of the past genocidal century, before the First World War and the Russian Revolution. — David Brion Davis

Sometimes, idealistic people are put off the whole business of networking as something tainted by flattery and the pursuit of selfish advantage. But virtue in obscurity is rewarded only in heaven. To succeed in this world, you have to be known to people. — Sonia Sotomayor

It would be perfect if everyone who makes love, is in love, but this is simply an unrealistic expectation. I'd say 75 percent of the population of people who make love, are not in love, this is simply the reality of the human race, and to be idealistic about this is to wait for the stars to aline and Jupiter to change color; for the Heavens to etch your names together in the sky before you make love to someone. But idealism is immaturity, and as a matter of fact, the stars may never aline, Jupiter may never change color, and the Heavens may never ever etch your names together in the sky for you to have the never-ending permission to make endless love to one another. And so the bottom line is, there really is no difference between doing something today, and doing something tomorrow, because today is what you have, and tomorrow may not turn out the way you expect it to. At the end of the day, sex is an animalistic, humanistic, passionate desire. — C. JoyBell C.

When I went to school, it was right after the '60s and before this general wave of practical purposefulness had set in ... The idealistic wind of the '60s was still at our backs, though, and most of the people I know who are my age have that engrained in them forever. — Steve Jobs

Time came. Or so I was later told. Sometimes, idealistic people are put off the whole business of networking as something tainted by flattery and the pursuit of selfish advantage. But virtue in obscurity is rewarded only in heaven. To succeed in this world, you have to be known to people. Nevertheless, — Sonia Sotomayor

What we need is a system of thought - you might even call it a religion - that can bind humans together. A system that would fit the Republic of Chad as well as the United States: a system that would supply our idealistic young people with something to believe in. — Abraham Maslow

We are coming to the times when passive Christianity and passive Christians will cease to exist. There is a maturity, a discipline and a divine militancy coming upon the people of God. Those who have succumbed to humanistic and idealistic theologies may have a hard time with this, but we must understand that God is a military God. The title that he uses ten times more than any other is "the Lord of Hosts", or "Lord of armies". There is a martial aspect to his character that we must understand and embrace for the times and the job to which we are now coming. — Rick Joyner

In other words, our constitution was designed by people who were idealistic but not ideological. There's a big difference. You can have a philosophy that tends to be liberal or conservative but still be open to evidence, experience, and argument. That enables people with honest differences to find practical, principled compromise. On the other hand, fervent insistence on an ideology makes evidence, experience, and arguments irrelevant: If you possess the absolute truth, those who disagree are by definition wrong, and evidence of success or failure is irrelevant. There is nothing to learn from the experience of other countries. Respectful arguments are a waste of time. Compromise is weakness. And if your policies fail, you don't abandon them; instead, you double down, asserting that they would have worked if only they had been carried to their logical extreme. — Bill Clinton

I used to think the most important thing for a reporter was to be where the news is and be the first to know. Now I feel a reporter should be able to effect change. Your reporting should move people and motivate people to change the world. Maybe this is too idealistic. Young people who want to be journalists must, first, study and, second, recognize that they should never be the heroes of the story..A journalist must be curious, and must be humble.
Zhou Yijun — Judy Polumbaum

Idealistic and self-sufficient and rugged people they had once been, and — John Green

Ghettos have their own characteristics and consequences :
be they physical. social, intellectual or mental, those who live in them always nurture projection of themselves or world around them that are more imaginary than true.
In the ghettos of the intellect and idealistic theories, there are a lot of intertolerant and racist people who do not realize that they are. — Tariq Ramadan

I understand why people do vote on the conservative side of the ticket because people have a tendency to go for strong governments when really, from an idealistic point of view, it's a bad thing. — David Lloyd

I was lucky to get into computers when it was a very young and idealistic industry. There weren't many degrees offered in computer science, so people in computers were brilliant people from mathematics, physics, music, zoology, whatever. They loved it, and no one was really in it for the money. — Steve Jobs

Young people: They care. They know that this is the world that they're going to grow up in, that they're going to spend the rest of their lives in. But, I think it's more idealistic than that. They actually believe that humanity, human species, has no right to destroy and despoil regardless. — David Attenborough

How many times in life have I been advised to "toe the line," to "tone it down," to stop "pushing the envelope"? As a journalist, I had to keep my opinions to myself for 30 years. I thought that, as an artist, I'd have the liberty to express my views. Now I'm told that doing so might hurt my readership.
I'm so idealistic, as I said elsewhere on FB today, that I think people ought to read my books because they're good. Period. — Sherry Jones

I don't like places or people either that haven't any faults. I think that a truly perfect person would be very uninteresting. — L.M. Montgomery

This may sound a little bit idealistic, but when I go to my blog, my Facebook page, my Twitter account, I talk to different people from all over the world, and you see how it's easy to establish a dialogue. — Paulo Coelho

Daisy Bowman, Lillian's young sister, had an out-sized personality that belied her small, slight frame. Idealistic and possessed of a decidedly whimsical bent, she devoured romantic novels populated with rogues and villains. However, Daisy's elfin facade concealed a shrewd intelligence that most people tended to overlook. She was fair-skinned and dark-haired, with eyes the color of spiced gingerbread... mischievous eyes with long, spiky lashes. — Lisa Kleypas

I do feel part of that generation of people who were rather idealistic in the '70s and became disillusioned in the '80s. Not just about social services issues, but the world. — Kazuo Ishiguro

The House Of Commons has never been a tea-party. It consists of strong-minded, often very idealistic people, who are trying to accomplish something for our country. We are inheritors of an adversarial system and that, in itself, fosters conflict. — John Allen Fraser

I've inspected your profile. You are not stupid. Misguided, idealistic, naive, certainly, but not stupid. You must know how societies work. You must at least have an inkling. They work on force, power and coercion. People don't behave themselves because they're nice. That's the liberal fallacy. People behave themselves because if they don't they'll be punished. All this is known. It isn't even debatable. Civilisation after civilisation, society after society, species after species, all show the same pattern. Society is control: control is reward and punishment. Reward is being allowed to partake of the fruits of that society and, as a general but not unbreakable rule, not being punished without cause. — Anonymous

It's not only imagination, it's the distortion of the vision. You suddenly think, This person is idealistic, this person is strong, this person has dreams, when you know better most of the time. You put what you want to see on people. — Olivier Martinez

Every decision a person makes stems from the person's values and goals. People can have many different goals and values; fame, profit, love, survival, fun, and freedom, are just some of the goals that a good person might have. When the goal is to help others as well as oneself, we call that idealism. My work on free software is motivated by an idealistic goal: spreading freedom and cooperation. I want to encourage free software to spread, replacing proprietary software that forbids cooperation, and thus make our society better. — Richard Stallman

She is a woman of honour and smartness whose wild leaves out luck, always taking risks, and there is something in her brow now, that only she can recognize in a mirror. Ideal and idealistic in that shiny dark hair! People fall in love with her. She is a woman I don't know well enough to hold in my wing, if writers have wings, to harbour for the rest of my life. — Michael Ondaatje

A pragmatic person sees the dark and the light side of life, while an
idealist sees a life filled with colors. — Eraldo Banovac

Nobody should be hitting lotto for 36 million dollars when we got people starving in the streets. That is not idealistic, that's just real. That is just stupid. There's no way Michael Jackson, or whoever should have thousands, millions, billions of dollars and we got people broke with two-three jobs and still can't pay bills on time. There's no way! No way these people should have planes when people don't have houses, apartments, shacks, drawers, pants!!! — Tupac Shakur

Architecture has always been a very idealistic profession. It's about making the world a better place, and it works over the generations because people go on vacation and they look for it. — Frank Gehry