* Our ideals are our better selves.
-- Amos Bronson Alcott

All men are prepared to accomplish the incredible
if their ideals are threatened.
-- Maya Angelou

* The ideals which have lighted me on my way and time after time given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.-- Albert Einstein

The breakage and agony rending us today will be our salvation if they drive us by new routes to meet it. . . . As of old we must be our own seers, musicians and explorers, and to an extent vaster than ever before. This is the purpose to which we are being summoned to harness our world-body!...Heroic responses in ideals and in conduct are a choice of regal dignity in the presence of a new earth and Heaven.
-- Helen Keller

* ...we must remain hopeful that for our children and our children’s children, that we are not a warring nation, but we will embrace and practice true compassion and honor the ideals of peace and freedom, and we will not give up.
-- Jessica Lange

So join with me in this campaign. Lend me your strength and your support-and together,
we will call America home to the ideals that nourished us in the beginning.
From secrecy, and deception in high places, come home, America...
From military spending so wasteful that it weakens our nation, come home, America.
From the entrenchment of special privilege and tax favoritism-
From the waste of idle hands to the joy of useful labor-
From the prejudice of race and sex-
From the loneliness of the aging poor and the despair of the neglected sick, come home, America.
Come home to the affirmation that we have a dream.
Come home to the conviction that we can move our country forward.
Come home to the belief that we can seek a newer world.
And let us be joyful in the homecoming,
for:' this land is your land, this land is my land.
From California to the New York Islands.
From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters.
This land was made for you and me.'
May God grant us the wisdom to cherish this good land and to meet the great challenge that beckons us home. This is the time.
-- George McGovern

Once you don't vote your ideals... that has serious undermining affects. It erodes the moral basis of our democracy.
~ Ralph Nader

* "Sometimes older folks tell me: 'I was idealistic and thought I could change the world once, too, but then I grew up.' I'm trying to help us change our definition of growing up, so that it ceases to mean giving up on our ideals, and comes to mean learning how to live our dreams, every day, on the Earth. I want to awaken the passion and creativity of youth, combine it with the wisdom, experience and insight of elders, and transform our world."
~ Ocean Robbins