George Carlin - Woodrow Wilson - Friedrich Nietzsche - Eamon de Valera - Walter Lippmann - Anne Frank - Penn Jillette - Albert Einstein - Stanley Kubrick - Susan Sontag - Andrew Graham-Dixon TV - Play for Today TV -
Scratch any cynic and you will find a disappointed idealist. George Carlin
America is the only idealistic nation in the world. Woodrow Wilson, speech September 1919
All idealism is falsehood in the face of necessity. Friedrich Nietzsche
All history is man’s efforts to realise ideals. Eamon de Valera
Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible. Walter Lippmann
I keep my ideals, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. Anne Frank
The highest ideals are human intelligence, creativity and love. Respect these above all. Penn Jillette
I see you’re a man with ideals. I better be going before you’ve still got them. Mae West
The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with joy are goodness, beauty, and truth. Albert Einstein
You’re an idealist, and I pity you as I would the village idiot. Stanley Kubrick
We like to stress the commonness of heroes. Essences seem undemocratic. We feel oppressed by the call to greatness. We regard an interest in glory or perfection as a sign of mental unhealthiness, and have decided that high achievers, who are called overachievers, owe their surplus ambition to a defect in mothering (either too little or too much). We want to admire but think we have a right not to be intimidated. We dislike feeling inferior to an ideal. So away with ideals, with essences. The only ideals allowed are healthy ones – those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing. Susan Sontag, The Volcano Lover: A Romance
You can’t fault Morris’s idealism though ... he became more political ... the more militant Socialist League. Andrew Graham-Dixon, The Art of Gothic: Britain’s Midnight Hour 3/3: Blood for Sale: Gothic Goes Global, BBC 2014
You went on at me about my ideals and for being over-optimistic. Well how often since then have I had to admit that you were right. But in those days I still believed that some of the ideals of my youth could be salvaged in spite of everything. Play for Today: Protest by Vaclav Havel, BBC 1981
I can’t help wondering if one has the right to escape. ibid.