#idealism

I'm not ready to let the youthful part of myself go yet. If maturity means becoming a cynic, if you have to kill the part of yourself that is naive and romantic and idealistic - the part of you that you treasure most - to claim maturity, is it not better to die young but with your humanity intact? ↗

— Kenneth Cain

#cynicism #idealism #maturity #age

It's my duty as a human being to be pissed off ↗

— Eric Bogosian

#angst #idealism #injustice #status-quo #youth

It isn't a circle--it is simply a long line--as in geometry, you know, one that reaches into infinity. And because we cannot see the end--we also cannot see how it changes. And it is very odd by those who see the changes--who dream, who will not give up--are called idealists...and those who see only the circle we call them the "realists"! ↗

— Lorraine Hansberry

#idealism #life #realism #change

The reason why we believe that change is possible is not because we are idealists but because we believe we have made it, so other people can make it as well. ↗

— Roméo Dallaire

#optimism #change

For if we regard space and time as properties that must, as regards their possibility, be found in things in themselves, [...] then we really cannot blame the good Bishop Berkeley for degrading bodies to mere illusion. Nay, even our own existence, which would thus be made dependent on the self-subsistent reality of a non-entity such as time, would, along with this time, be changed into mere illusion - an absurdity of which hitherto no one has been guilty. ↗

— Immanuel Kant

#change

As long as the vision of heaven is always changing, the vision of earth will be exactly the same. No ideal will remain long enough to be realized, or even partly realized. The modern young man will never change his environment; for he will always change his mind. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#heaven #idealism #progress #change

Being an idealist is not being a simpleton; without idealists there would be no optimism and without optimism there would be no courage to achieve advances that so-called realists would have you believe could never come to fruition. ↗

— Alisa Steinberg

#optimism #realists #courage

Let us depart instead for the fields of Dreams and wander those blue, romantic hills where stands the abandoned tower of the Supernatural, where cool mosses clothe the ruins of Idealism. Let us, in short, indulge in a little fantasy! ↗

— Eça de Queirós

#fantastic #fantasy #idealism #literature #supernatural

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

— Bertrand Russell

#cooking #fragrance #humor #idealism #metaphors

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