93 Ideals Quotes

Politics and the fate of mankind are formed by men without ideals and without greatness. Those who have greatness within them do not go in for politics.

A cause may be inconvenient, but it's magnificent. It's like champagne or high heels, and one must be prepared to suffer for it.

It isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it.

This country is heaven, in the spiritual sense of the word. And I say, we prefer to die in heaven than survive in hell.

Since pacifists have more freedom of action in countries where traces of democracy survive, pacifism can act more effectively against democracy than for it. Objectively the pacifist is pro-Nazi.

The President is not only the leader of a party, he is the President of the whole people. He must interpret the conscience of America. He must guide his conduct by the idealism of our people.

We should not mourn for men of high ideals. Rather we should rejoice that we had the privilege of having had them with us, to inspire us by their radiant personalities.

This is unfortunately a world in which things find it difficult, frequently impossible, to live up to their names.

Fill the brain with high thoughts, highest ideals, place them day and night before you, and out of that will come great work.

Some men can live up to their loftiest ideals without ever going higher than a basement.

Our heritage and ideals, our code and standards - the things we live by and teach our children - are preserved or diminished by how freely we exchange ideas and feelings.

All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods.

Take the happiest man, the one most envied by the world, and in nine cases out of ten his inmost consciousness is one of failure. Either his ideals in the line of his achievements are pitched far higher than the achievements themselves, or else he has secret ideals of which the world knows nothing, and in regard to which he inwardly knows himself to be found wanting.

Posterity is the world to come; the world for whom we hold our ideals, from whom we have borrowed our planet, and to whom we bear sacred responsibility. We must do what America does best: offer more opportunity to all and demand responsibility from all.

Take man's most fantastic invention - God. Man invents God in the image of his longings, in the image of what he wants to be, then proceeds to imitate that image, vie with it, and strive to overcome it.

To live and work successfully with others requires more than faithfulness to one's concrete aims. It requires an intellectual commitment to a type of order in which, even on issues which to one are fundamental, others are allowed to pursue different ends. It is for this reason that to the liberal neither moral nor religious ideals are proper objects of coercion, while both conservatives and socialists recognize no such limits.

Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.

America has never been united by blood or birth or soil. We are bound by ideals that move us beyond our backgrounds, lift us above our interests and teach us what it means to be citizens.

The great ideals of the past failed not by being outlived (which must mean over-lived), but by not being lived enough. Mankind has not passed through the Middle Ages. Rather mankind has retreated from the Middle Ages in reaction and rout. The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.

Cherish your visions; cherish your ideals; cherish the music that stirs in your heart, the beauty that forms in your mind, the loveliness that drapes your purest thoughts, for out of them will grow all delightful conditions, all, heavenly environment; of these, if you but remain true to them, your world will at last be built.

The belief in a political Utopia is especially dangerous. This is possibly connected with the fact that the search for a better world, like the investigation of our environment, is (if I am correct) one of the oldest and most important of all the instincts.

Architecture was my way of expressing my ideals: to be simple, to create a world equal to everyone, to look at people with optimism, that everyone has a gift. I don't want anything but general happiness. Why is that bad?

He thought it happier to be dead, To die for Beauty, than live for bread.

It is better to die for an idea that will live, than to live for an idea that will die.

Compassion is probably the only antitoxin of the soul. Where there is compassion even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless. One would rather see the world run by men who set their hearts on toys but are accessible to pity, than by men animated by lofty ideals whose dedication makes them ruthless. In the chemistry of man's soul, almost all noble attributes - courage, honor, hope, faith, duty, loyalty, etc. - can be transmuted into ruthlessness. Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us.

The earth is a nursery in which men and women play at being heroes and heroines, saints and sinners; but they are dragged down from their fool's paradise by their bodies: hunger and cold and thirst, age and decay and disease, death above all, make them slaves of reality: thrice a day meals must be eaten and digested: thrice a century a new generation must be engendered: ages of faith, of romance, and of science are all driven at last to have but one prayer 'Make me a healthy animal.'

The dreamers are the saviours of the world. As the visible world is sustained by the invisible, so men, through all their trials and sins and sordid vocations, are nourished by the beautiful visions of their solitary dreamers. Humanity cannot forget its dreamers; it cannot let their ideals fade and die; it lives in them; it knows them as the realities which it shall one day see and know.

Do not allow your dreams of a beautiful world to lure you away from the claims of men who suffer here and now. Our fellow men have a claim to our help; no generation must be sacrificed for the sake of future generations, for the sake of an ideal of happiness that may never be realised.

From Stettin on the Baltic to Varna on the Black Sea, the regimes planted by totalitarianism have had more than thirty years to establish their legitimacy. But none - not one regime - has yet been able to risk free elections. Regimes planted by bayonets do not take root....If history teaches anything, it teaches self-delusion in the face of unpleasant facts is folly....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.

Blood that has soaked into the sands of a beach is all of one color. America stands unique in the world: the only country not founded on race but on a way, an ideal. Not in spite of but because of our polyglot background, we have had all the strength in the world. That is the American way.

Success as a result of industry is a peasant ideal.

Odour of blood when Christ was slain Made all platonic tolerance vain And vain all Doric discipline.

My engagements were always idealistic.

You only grow old by deserting your ideals. Years wrinkle the skin, giving up wrinkles the soul.

With the conception that the Revolution was only a means of securing political power, it was inevitable that all revolutionary values should be subordinated to the needs of the Socialist State; indeed, exploited to further the security of the newly acquired governmental power.

No sacrifice is lost for a great ideal! (p. 135)

Its typical of Mexico, of the whole human race perhaps - violence in favour of an ideal and then the ideal lost but the violence just going on.

Had Grover Cleveland been a politician, with the record of a spoilsman behind, his promises would mean little. They might have deceived a few of the simple, disgusted a few of the honest, caused mirth to a few other spoilsmen, and thus fulfilled their intended mission; for Americans had long since learned that, as the devil can quote Scripture, so the most dangerous type of demagogue can sing of ideals in false notes not easily distinguishable from true. But Mr. Cleveland had already put into practice the ideals which he announced, and Republicans bent on reform rallied to his support with an enthusiasm equal to that of his Democratic followers.

A plant, an animal, the regular order of nature-probably also the disposition of the whole universe-give manifest evidence that they are possible only by means of and according to ideas; that, indeed, no one creature, under the individual conditions of its existence, perfectly harmonizes with the idea of the most perfect of its kind-just as little as man with the idea of humanity, which nevertheless he bears in his soul as the archetypal standard of his actions; that, notwithstanding, these ideas are in the highest sense individually, unchangeably, and completely determined, and are the original causes of things; and that the totality of connected objects in the universe is alone fully adequate to that idea. (B 374)

Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.

Others go to bed with their mistresses; I with my ideas.

It is a useless life that is not consecrated to a great ideal. It is like a stone wasted in the field without becoming part of an edifice.

I'm a lawyer. I make lawyers for a living. I believe in the law. I believe in the law of copyright. Indeed, I have devoted my life to working in law, not because there are big bucks at the end but because there are ideals at the end that I would love to live. Yet much of this book has been a criticism of lawyers, or the role lawyers have played in this debate. The law speaks to ideals, but it is my view that our profession has become too attuned to the client. And in a world where the rich clients have one strong view, the unwillingness of the profession to question or counter that one strong view queers the law. The evidence of this bending is compelling. I'm attacked as a 'radical' by many within the profession, yet the positions that I am advocating are precisely the positions of some of the most moderate and significant figures in the history of this branch of the law.

Let me tell you the truth. The truth is, what is. And what should be is a fantasy, a terrible terrible lie that someone gave to the people long ago.

The 'what should be' never did exist, but people keep trying to live up to it. There is no 'what should be,' there is only what is.

There are only two forces in the world, the sword and the spirit. In the long run the sword will always be conquered by the spirit.

During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons will live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for. But, my lord, if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

Our dreams of bringing the whole of human history under the control of the human will are ironically refuted by the fact that no group of idealists can easily move the pattern of history toward the desired goal of peace and justice. The recalcitrant forces in the historical drama have a power and persistence beyond our reckoning.

Together we must rise to ever higher and higher platitudes.

Why destroy arete? And no sooner had he asked the question than the answer came to him. Plato hadn't tried to destroy arete. He had encapsulated it; made a permanent, fixed Idea out of it; had converted it to a rigid, immobile Immortal Truth. He made arete the Good, the highest form, the highest Idea of all. It was subordinate only to Truth itself, in a synthesis of all that had gone before.

I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.

Ideals survive through change. They die through inertia in the face of challenge.

It's not true that you should first think up an idea for a better world and only then 'put it into practice,' but, rather, through the fact of your existence in the world, you create the idea or manifest it - create it, as it were, from the 'material of the world,' articulate it in the 'language of the world.'

Ce besoin de l'immateriel est le plus vivace de tous. Il faut du pain; mais avant le pain, il faut l'ideal.

Violence is, of course, alien to our ideals.

To have striven, to have made the effort, to have been true to certain ideals - this alone is worth the struggle.

It's difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality. It's a wonder I haven't abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart. I simply can't build my hopes on a foundation of confusion, misery, and death...and yet...I think...this cruelty will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.