Pursuit of perfection

Usage examples of idealism.

Bismarck and Cavour seized the opportunity of making extremely useful for Germany and Italy the irrelevant and vacillating idealism and the timid absolutism of the third Napoleon.

He was obliged to recognise the utter absence of idealism from all save Grail--unless Bunce might be credited with glimmerings of the true light.

Luke, though not to such a violent degree as Bunce, was led to offer opposition to everything savouring of idealism--that is to say, of idealism as Egremont had presented it.

The opposite of racism is antiracism, of course, or what we might call racial idealism or equalitarianism, and it is still not clear whether it will prevail.

Orders from superiors, pressures from influential individuals, offers of financial and political gainand regrets for early idealisms abandoned, tarnished integrity, disappointed dreams.

What Gryf had responded to in his work was a pure idealism and innocence that could not exist in captivity.

For at least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.

Thus does Sketchley introduce Delgado as a man who has been a dedicated soldier with some idealism, but dedicated to the previous regime, wishing to redeem his position with the current one, though viewing it as degenerate and Myson a monster.

There was in Mary Viner a gentleness that consented, and a young idealism that rebelled.

This is the bestowal of divine idealism, the crown adorning human heads.

What other results could have been expected when American society began to overvalue on the one hand security, censorship, an imagined world-saving idealism and self-sacrifice in war, and on the other hand insatiable hunger for possessions, fiercely competitive aggressiveness, sadistic male belligerence, contempt for parents and the state, and a fantastically overstimulated sexuality?

The rabid determination of partizan politicians not to allow the United States to enter into any agreement with the rest of the world to stop war, the outbreaks of violence among the criminal classes, the determined efforts of the liquor interests to nullify the constitutional Prohibition amendment, the depression in business, the increase of unemployment, the strenuous effort of the agitators to make trouble between this country and Great Britain on one side and Japan on the other, all may be grouped with this pathetic spectacle of respectable women turned shoplifters as an indication of that other moral slump from idealism.

Think of the advancement man has made since the time when he was a cannibal cave dweller, shivering out of the glacial epoch, and contending with wild beasts for a foothold on the earth, till now that he enjoys the idealism of Berkeley, wields the quaternions of Hamilton, uses the lightnings for his red sandaled messengers, holds his spectroscope to a star and tells what elements compose it, or to an outskirting nebula and declares it a mass of incandescent hydrogen.

The opposite of racism is antiracism, of course, or what we might call racial idealism or equalitarianism, and it is still not clear whether it will prevail.

Skreta, a gynecologist and abortionist who represents another kind of idealism, that of the scientist.