303 Quotes About Idealism

We've already had Malthus, the friend of humanity. But the friend of humanity with shaky moral principles is the devourer of humanity, to say nothing of his conceit; for, wound the vanity of any one of these numerous friends of humanity, and he's ready to set fire to the world out of petty revenge—like all the rest of us, though, in that, to be fair; like myself, vilest of all, for I might well be the first to bring the fuel and run away myself.

I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are good people and bad people. You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.

Only one number can stake any claim to any special status, and that is zero – the origin – upon which all other numbers depend. It is the perfect balance point of all the other numbers, which is why the monad is the “container” of all other numbers, their source. There it is, slap bang in the middle of the Euler unit circle, controlling all. It’s the SOUL of the circle.

Minds are made of light (photons). Photons are massless, immaterial, unextended, dimensionless, maximally length contracted and time dilated, as per Einstein's special theory of relativity. Nothing material can be accelerated to light speed. The speed of light is an absolute term, while speed through space is relative. These facts rationally prove that light belongs to a different ontological category from matter, hence materialism is false.

We are like a man who goes round a castle seeking in vain for an entrance, and sometimes sketching the facades. If we can ferret out the ultimate nature of our own minds we shall perhaps have the key to the external world. 

The faculty of being acquainted with things other than itself is the main characteristic of a mind.

If Feingold does it, if he wins this race in this year, it will not be as just another Democratic senator. It will not be as a maverick, nor even as an idealist. It will be as a signal that maybe, just maybe, people power can still beat the money power. That senators aren't just extensions of parties and presidents, and that politics can be about something more than Democratic toothpaste versus Republican toothpaste.

Be idealistic about the future, be realistic about the present, and never forget the lessons of the past.

Being an idealist is not being a simpleton; without idealists there would be no optimism and without optimism there would be no courage to achieve advances that so-called realists would have you believe could never come to fruition.