Do not commit the error, common among the young, of assuming that if you cannot save the whole of mankind, you have failed.

 —Jan de Hartog

Look at a stone cutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.

—Jacob A. Riis

An idealist believes the short run doesn’t count. A cynic believes the long run doesn’t matter. A realist believes that what is done or left undone in the short run determines the long run.

—Sydney J. Harris

Idealist: One who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.

 — H.L. Mencken

I’m an idealist. I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m on my way.

 —Carl Sandburg

An idealist is a person who helps other people to be prosperous.

—Henry Ford

Cynics regarded everybody as equally corrupt... Idealists regarded everybody as equally corrupt, except themselves.

—Robert Anton Wilson

Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows.

—David T. Wolf

Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.

—Miguel de Cervantes

There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong.                                                                        —G.K. Chesterton

Freedom is not an ideal, it is not even a protection, if it means nothing more than freedom to stagnate, to live without dreams, to have no greater aim than a second car and another television set.

— Adlai Stevenson