#ideal

An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup. ↗

— H.L. Mencken

#idealism #idealist #food

Regimes planted by bayonets do not take root... Our military strength is a prerequisite to peace, but let it be clear we maintain this strength in the hope it will never be used, for the ultimate determinant in the struggle that's now going on in the world will not be bombs and rockets but a test of wills and ideas, a trial of spiritual resolve, the values we hold, the beliefs we cherish, the ideals to which we are dedicated. ↗

— Ronald Reagan

#ideals #ideas #peace #resolve #values

He saw that science had become as great a hoax as religion, that nationalism was a farce, patriotism a fraud, education a form of leprosy, and that morals were for cannibals ↗

— Henry Miller

#morals #nationalism #religion #science #education

To try to reform all the power structures at once would leave us with no power structure to use in our project. In any case, we will be able to see that absolute moral renewal could be attempted only by an absolute power and that a tyrannous force such as this must destroy the whole moral life of man, not renew it. ↗

— Michael Polanyi

#tyranny #life

In the modern world, we are primarily confronted with the extraordinary spectacle of people turning to new ideals because they have not tried the old. Men have not gotten tired of Christianity; they have never found enough Christianity to get tired of. Men have never wearied of political justice; they have wearied of waiting for it. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#ideals #politics #men

Idealism, though just in its premises, and often daring and honest in their application, is stultified by the exclusive intellectualism of its own methods: by its fatal trust in the squirrel-work of the industrious brain instead of the piercing vision of the desirous heart. It interests man, but does not involve him in its processes: does not catch him up to the new and more real life which it describes. Hence the thing that matters, the living thing, has somehow escaped it; and its observations bear the same relation to reality as the art of the anatomist does to the mystery of birth. ↗

— Evelyn Underhill

#intellectualism #mysticism #art

Men think that it is essential that the "Nation" have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, wether they do or not; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain. ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#men

Fathers never have exactly the daughters they want because they invent a notion a them that the daughters have to conform to. ↗

— Simone de Beauvoir

#daughters #expectations #fathers #ideals #perception

A man is always devoted to something more tangible than a woman - the idea of her. ↗

— Bauvard

#humor #idealism #love #men-and-women #funny

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own. ↗

— Mark Twain

#discover #his #ideally #order #own