“I keep my ideals, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.”
“If you are going to build something in the air it is always better to build castles than houses of cards.”
“When they come downstairs from their Ivory Towers, idealists are very apt to walk straight into the gutter.”
“Ideals are like the stars: we never reach them, but like the mariners of the sea, we chart our course by them.”
“Idealists are foolish enough to throw caution to the winds. They have advanced mankind and have enriched the world.”
“It is the style of idealism to console itself for the loss of something old with the ability to gape at something new.”
“An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it is also more nourishing.”
“Instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being that we are not, we have to live and let live in order to create what we are.”
“A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.”
“Man is born a predestined idealist, for he is born to act. To act is to affirm the worth of an end, and to persist in affirming the worth of an end is to make an ideal.”
“We for a certainty are not the first have sat in taverns while the tempest hurled their hopeful plans to emptiness, and cursed whatever brute and blackguard made the world.”
“An idealist believes the short run doesn't count. A cynic believes the long run doesn't matter. A realist believes that what is done or left undone in the short run determines the long run.”
“Some day the soft Ideal that we wooed confronts us fiercely, foe-beset, pursued, and cries reproachful: ''Was it then my praise, and not myself was loved? Prove now thy truth; I claim of thee the promise of thy youth.''”
“Many have dreamed up republics and principalities that have never in truth been known to exist; the gulf between how one should live and how one does live is so wide that a man who neglects what is actually done for what should be done learns the way to self-destruction rather than self-preservation.”
“Nearly all the Escapists in the long past have managed their own budget and their social relations so unsuccessfully that I wouldn't want them for my landlords, or my bankers, or my neighbors. They were valuable, like powerful stimulants, only when they were left out of the social and industrial routine.”
“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.”
“The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely ''understandable'' world. Name it the mystical region, or the supernatural region, whichever you choose. So far as our ideal impulses originate in this region (and most of them do originate in it, for we find them possessing us in a way for which we cannot articulately account), we belong to it in a more intimate sense than that in which we belong to the visible world, for we belong in the most intimate sense wherever our ideals belong.”
“It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet, I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever-approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.”