Idealism Vs Reality Quotes

I wanted to be a man who travelled the world to make peace. I didn't realise that most diplomats are megaphones for their governments.

There is no dream of love, however ideal it may be, which does not end up with a fat, greedy baby hanging from the breast.

Reality is a lovely place, but I wouldn't want to live there.

It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled in them, and each time they come into contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded.

We were happy a hundred years ago. We knew that there were exploiters and exploited, wealthy and poor, and we had a perfect idea of how to get rid of injustice; we would expropriate the owners and turn the wealth over to the common good. We expropriated the owners and we created one of the most monstrous and oppressive social systems in world history. And we keep repeating that in principle everything was all right, only some unfortunate accidents slipped in and slightly spoiled the good idea. Now let us start afresh.

Americans like to believe we can overcome all obstacles and always triumph in the end, but that's not real life and a steady diet of stories like that will give you a pretty unhealthy view of reality.

I had this fantasy that in a democracy the government was the population. So I came to America and got a big slap in my face... Americans were not what I thought. I thought I was going to see bastards and I saw nice people, very friendly to me.

Every nation necessarily inhabits a morally compromised space. All too often our ideals seem to be held to ransom by what we believe, rightly or wrongly, to be objective reality.

We all have idealism. We think we're healthy and then, all of a sudden, one day, you have cancer. The truth has a mind of its own.

Everything is so dreamy when you are young. After you grow up it kind of becomes -- just real.

Women are treated as unjustly in poetry as in life. The feminine ones are not idealistic, and the idealistic not feminine.

... I have developed, over the years, some sense of the difference between real horseshit that you can step in and Ideal Platonic Horseshit that exists, evidently, only in the contemplation of those who worship such abstractions; and I continue to notice that Natural Law bears an uncanny resemblance to ideal Platonic Horseshit.

You know, the one with all the well meaning rules that don't work out in real life, uh, Christianity.

The self-fulfilled woman is far from reality.

If the generous ideas of youth are too often over- clouded by the sordid views of after-life, that scarcely proves them to be false

Under the ideal measure of values there lurks the hard cash.

It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are... than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.

The Minimalists are idealist. They want to minimise themselves in favour of the ideal. But I just can't. You see, my paintings are not cool. ... I'm very careful not to have ideas, because they're inaccurate.

We were sweet, lovely people who wanted to throw out all the staid institutions who placed money and wars above all else. When you're young you think that's how life works.

School is such an encouraging and safe environment. It's filled with idealism and just really working on your craft. When you enter the business world - where art meets commerce - it can become quite depressing.

This conflict between right and fact has endured since the origins of society. To bring the duel to an end, to consolidate the pure ideal with the human reality, to make the right peacefully interpenetrate the fact, and the fact the right, this is the work of the wise.

I went in with the youthful vigor that I could single-handedly change the world. But you fast come to the realization that you're 1/435th of one-half of one-third of the government.

That youthful fervor, which is sometimes called enthusiasm, but which is a heat of imagination subsequently discovered to be inconsistent with the experience of actual life.

Before her marriage she had thought that she had love within her grasp; but since the happiness which she had expected this love to bring her hadn’t come, she supposed she must have been mistaken. And Emma tried to imagine just what was meant, in life, by the words “bliss,” “passion,” and “rapture” - words that had seemed so beautiful to her in books.

One of the baffling things about life is that the purposes of institutions may be ideal, while their administration, dependent upon the faults and weaknesses of human beings, may be bad.