“Scratch any cynic and you will find a disappointed idealist.”
– George Carlin
“…After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world. I am strongly of the opinion that the great majority of people will always find these are the moving impulses of our life. But it is only those who do not understand our people, who believe that our national life is entirely absorbed by material motives. We make no concealment of the fact that we want wealth, but there are many other things that we want much more. We want peace and honor, and that charity which is so strong an element of all civilization. The chief ideal of the American people is idealism.”
– Calvin Coolidge
“If you belong to the capitalist world system, material wealth is the starting point of life. The more money, the easier it is to penetrate a person’s heart. With idealism, which considers love and sentimental feelings to be the goal of life, it is hardly possible to achieve happiness, which is rooted in the material world.”
– Elmar Hussein
“There is a spark of idealism within every individual which can be fanned into flame and bring forth extraordinary results.”
– Louis D. Brandeis
“It is through the idealism of youth that man catches sight of truth, and in that idealism he possesses a wealth which he must never exchange for anything else.”
– Albert Schweitzer
“Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths?”
– Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
“Once people said: Give me liberty or give me death. Now they say: Make me a slave, just pay me enough.”
– Todd Garlington
“Yet here was Morrie talking with the wonder of our college years, as if I’d simply been on a long vacation.
– Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
..I once promised I would never work for money, that I would join the Peace Corps, that I would live in beautiful, inspirational places.”
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6900.Tuesdays_with_Morrie
= Highly recommended!
“I’m restless. My whole generation is restless. I’m sick of a system where the richest man gets the most beautiful girl if he wants her, where the artist without an income has to sell his talents to a button manufacturer. Even if I had no talents I’d not be content to work ten years, condemned either to celibacy or a furtive indulgence, to give some man’s son an automobile.”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Idealist 