2.
Idealism without realism is impotent. Realism without idealism is immoral.
Richard M. Nixon
5.
Ultimately, we measure ourselves against our own ideas of idealism and perfection, and we don't always come very close to them.
Joyce Carol Oates
6.
Idealism without pragmatism is impotent. Pragmatism without idealism is meaningless. The key to effective leadership is pragmatic idealism.
Richard M. Nixon
7.
Cynics regarded everybody as equally corrupt... Idealists regarded everybody as equally corrupt, except themselves.
Robert Anton Wilson
9.
A visionary company doesn't simply balance between idealism and profitability: it seeks to be highly idealistic and highly profitable.
James C. Collins
10.
There is no force so democratic as the force of an ideal.
Calvin Coolidge
11.
It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.
Assata Shakur
12.
We have to live and let live in order to create what we are.
Albert Camus
13.
I have never been an idealist - that implies you aren't going to achieve something.
Arthur Scargill
15.
It seems to be the fate of idealists to obtain what they have struggled for in a form which destroys their ideals.
Bertrand Russell
16.
If you didn't have some sense of idealism, then what is there to sustain you?
James Carville
17.
Quiet heroism or youthful idealism, or both? What do we know? That life without heroism and idealism is not worth living - or that either can be fatal?
Erich Segal
18.
It's important to start off with ideals, even if they become modified at some later stage.
Stuart Pearson Wright
19.
In the revolt against idealism, the ambiguities of the word experience have been perceived, with the result that realists have more and more avoided the word.
Bertrand Russell
20.
The purest idealism is unconsciously equivalent to the deepest knowledge.
Adolf Hitler
21.
Don't look back, you can never look back
Don Henley
24.
The ideal, after all, is true than the real: for the ideal is the eternal element in perishable things.
Henri Frederic Amiel
27.
Pursuit of the approximate can conclude. Not so pursuit of the absolute.
Mason Cooley
28.
Idealism is the death of the body and the imagination. All but freedom, utter freedom, is death
Anais Nin
29.
Idealism is based on big ideas. And, as anybody who has ever been asked "What's the big idea?" knows, most big ideas are bad ones.
P. J. O'Rourke
30.
There is an idealism associated with poetry I would not dispel but question. It doesn't change anything except within. It shifts your insides around. Poetry is not going to reach the numbers of people by which we commonly consider a large audience. It just isn't a stadium-filler. It could still galvanize people during a crisis, but let's just say there are two points at which poetry is indispensable to people - at the point of love and the point of death. I'll second that emotion.
C.D. Wright
32.
You cannot chase a dollar and an ideal at the same time.
Austin O'Malley
33.
The single most amazing phenomenon is the discrediting of idealism.
Susan Sontag
34.
The highest ideals are human intelligence, creativity and love. Respect these above all.
Penn Jillette
36.
Idealism is a fuel for living, and there is an absolute efficiency about how it motivates and propels us.
Rick Alverson
38.
My idealism has not abated, but I have witnessed it withering away nationwide, to the point where at least among the young, to have ideals is akin to being blinkered and oldfashioned.
Charles Kennedy
40.
We are a purely idealistic Nation but let no one confuse our idealism with weakness.
Jimmy Carter
43.
My belief is that no human being or society composed of human beings ever did or ever will come to much unless their conduct was governed and guided by the love of some ethical ideal.
Thomas Huxley
44.
A dead martyr is just another corpse.
Leo Gordon
45.
Every materialist will be an idealist; but an idealist can never go backward to be a materialist.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
47.
It is very important that you express your idealism actively, to what ever extent you can, for this increases your sense of worth and power.
Seth
48.
Ideals are great in theory ... but they don't work too well in real life.
Laurell K. Hamilton
50.
It is curious that Christianity, which is idealism, is sturdily defended by the brokers, and steadily attacked by the idealists.
Ralph Waldo Emerson