Ideals are like stars: you will not succeed in touching them with your hands, but like the seafaring man on the desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them you reach your destiny.
~Carl Schurz

Our ideals, like the gods of old, are constantly demanding human sacrifices.
~George Bernard Shaw

Some people never have anything except ideals.
~E.W. Howe

When a man forgets his ideals he may hope for happiness, but not till then.
~John Oliver Hobbes

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

You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements.
~Norman Douglas, South Wind

We are all inclined to judge ourselves by our ideals; others, by their acts.
~Harold Nicolson

Idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem.
~John Galsworthy

Materialism is a circumference without a centre. Idealism is a centre without a circumference.
~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows.
~David T. Wolf

Though I believe in liberalism, I find it difficult to believe in liberals.
~G.K. Chesterton

An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
~Henry L. Mencken

Every dogma has its day, but ideals are eternal.
~Israel Zangwill