Youthful Idealism Quotes

One of the wiser clichés of the 20th century stated that if you aren’t a Communist before you are 21, there is something wrong with your heart. If you remain one after you are 21, there is something wrong with your head.

Anyone who is not a liberal in his youth has no heart. Anyone who remains so as he matures has no brain!

Show me a young Conservative and I'll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old Liberal and I'll show you someone with no brains.

I never dared be radical when young for fear it would make me conservative when old.

youth has everything - everything but experience and tolerance.

When I was younger, I just thought that my plans were probably going to be more exciting than my parents' plans or the establishment. I sort of got by on being a little bit of a rebel.

Eighteen is a terrible age, and while I walked around with the conviction that I was somehow more grown-up than my classmates, the truth was that I had merely found a different way of being young.

When I was 18, I thought that, to be a romantic, you couldn't live past 30.

If one could recover the uncompromising spirit of one's youth, one's greatest indignation would be for what one has become.

The child thinks of growing old as an almost obscene calamity, which for some mysterious reason will never happen to itself. All who have passed the age of thirty are joyless grotesques, endlessly fussing about things of no importance and staying alive without, so far as the child can see, having anything to live for. Only child life is real life.

The young have a genius for discovering imagined grievances. It goes without saying that imagined grievances cannot be cured but they enable the young to evade those aspects of reality which do not minister to their self-importance... .

We're no longer young men. We've lost any desire to conquer the world. We are refugees. We are fleeing from ourselves. From our lives. We were eighteen years old, and we had just begun to love the world and to love being in it; but we had to shoot at it. The first shell to land went straight for our hearts. We've been cut off from real action, from getting on, from progress. We don't believe in those things any more; we believe in the war.

It was a wonderful time to be young. The 1960s didn't end until about 1976. We all believed in Make Love Not War - we were idealistic innocents, darling, despite the drugs and sex. 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. None of us were famous, we were broke. We didn't think they'd be writing books about us in 30 years. We were just kids doing the right thing.

When one is young, one venerates and despises without that art of nuances which constitutes the best gain of life.

If you don't begin to be a revolutionist at the age of twenty, then at fifty you will be a most impossible old fossil. If you area red revolutionary at the age of twenty, you have some chance of being up-to-date when you are forty!

As a teenager, I had a weakness for freedom fighters. When Mugabe came to London to negotiate independence, I vanished from home to stand outside his hotel. I was very disappointed that he looked like a dorky teacher.

You know you have a lot of impatience with reality as you see it when you're a young man and full of dynamism and strength and ideals and so on.

Besides, Rose Bradwardine, beautiful and amiable as we have described her, had not precisely the sort of beauty or merit which captivates a romantic imagination in early youth. She was too frank, too confiding, too kind; amiable qualities, undoubtedly, but destructive of the marvellous, with which a youth of imagination delights to dress the empress of his affections.

In the order I was in, each brother takes five vows, one of which is teaching the poor gratuitously. As a young person I was seized by this idea of social justice and I wanted very much to follow my vow of teaching the poor gratuitously.

To be young is to live in the hope of escaping youth; to be old, in the despair of having succeeded.

Happy the youth who believes that his duty is to remake the world and bring it more in accord with virtue and justice, more in accord with his own heart. Woe to whoever commences his life without lunacy.

Youth is the time of life lived for some imaginary audience.

Children are great idealists, until the stupidity of their elders puts out the fires of the aspirations.

When young people are too rigidly sequestered from [the world], their lively and romantic imaginations paint it to them as a paradise of which they have been beguiled; but when they are shown it properly, and in due time, they see it such as it really is, equally shared by pain and pleasure, hope and disappointment.

Cynicism is a sure sign of youth.