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.
Quotes about idealists (15 Quotes)
Cynics regarded everybody as equally corrupt... Idealists regarded everybody as equally corrupt, except themselves.
There is no proletarian, not even a Communist movement, that has not operated in the interests of money, and for the time being permitted by money - and that without the idealists among its leaders having the slightest suspicion of the fact.
The idealists will always be in society, and we will survive.
It seems to be the fate of idealists to obtain what they have struggled for in a form which destroys their ideals.
The most perplexing form of evil, and especially so for all idealists, is that kind of evil which comes out of our efforts to do good. Perhaps when we try to do good without love, we create evil.
We shall need compromises in the days ahead, to be sure. But these will be, or should be, compromises of issues, not principles. We can compromise our political positions, but not ourselves. We can resolve the clash of interests without conceding our ideals. And even the necessity for the right kind of compromise does not eliminate the need for those idealists and reformers who keep our compromises moving ahead, who prevent all political situations from meeting the description supplied by Shaw smirched with compromise, rotted with opportunism, mildewed by expedience, stretched out of shape with wirepulling and putrefied with permeation. Compromise need not mean cowardice. ...
It was young, idealistic and wonderful. But idealists have a hard time in this world.
Children see things very well sometimes - and idealists even better.
The idealist's program of political or economic reform may be impracticable, absurd, demonstrably ridiculous but it can never be successfully opposed merely by pointing out that this is the case. A negative opposition cannot be wholly effectual there must be a competing idealism something must be offered that is not only less objectionable but more desirable.
For I say unto you in all sadness of conviction that to think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists. Only when you have worked alone when you have felt around you are a black gulf of solitude more isolating than that which surrounds the dying man, and in hope and despair have trusted to your own unshaken will then only can you gain the secret isolated joy of the thinker, who knows that a hundred years after he is dead and forgotten men who have never heard of him will be moving to the measure of his thought the subtle rapture of postponed power, which the world knows not because it has no external trappings, but which to his prophetic vision is more real than that which commands an army. And if this joy should not be yours, still it is only thus you can know that you have done what lay in you to do can say that you have lived, and be ready for the end.
Idealists are foolish enough to throw caution to the winds. They have advanced mankind and have enriched the world.
I fear that, in the end, the famous debate among materialists, idealists, and dualists amounts to a merely verbal dispute that is more a matter for the linguist than for the speculative philosopher.
When they come downstairs from their Ivory Towers, idealists are very apt to walk straight into the gutter.
The idealists dream and the dream is told, and the practical men listen and ponder and bring back the truth and apply it to human life, and progress and growth and higher human ideals come into being and so the world moves ever on.