“Those impractical dreamers are entitled to ask their critics what is so practical about war.”
UN Address (1999)
Context: For how many thousands of years now have we humans been what we insist on calling "civilized?" And yet, in total contradiction, we also persist in the savage belief that we must occasionally, at least, settle our arguments by killing one another.
While we spend much of our time and a great deal of our treasure in preparing for war, we see no comparable effort to establish a lasting peace. Meanwhile, emphasizing the sloth in this regard, those advocates who work for world peace by urging a system of world government are called impractical dreamers. Those impractical dreamers are entitled to ask their critics what is so practical about war.
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Walter Cronkite50
American broadcast journalist 1916–2009Related quotes
“The Outsider has his proper place in the Order of Society, as the impractical dreamer.”
Colin Wilson book The Outsider
Source: The Outsider (1956), Chapter Three, The Romantic Outsider
“Intellect is neither practical nor impractical; it is extra-practical.”
Richard Hofstadter (1916–1970) American historian
Source: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1974), p. 30
“What the war did to dreamers.”
Anthony Doerr book All the Light We Cannot See
Source: All the Light We Cannot See
“Jesus is not an impractical idealist; he is the practical realist.”
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement
1950s, Loving Your Enemies (Christmas 1957)
John Osborne (1929–1994) English playwright
Quoted in Time magazine, October 31, 1977. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,945814,00.html <br class="br">Also attributed to Christopher Hampton by the Sunday Times Magazine (16 October 1977)
Christopher Hampton (1946) British playwright, screenwriter and film director
Sunday Times Magazine (London, October 16, 1977)
Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) American birth control activist, educator and nurse
One Minute News (1947), interview with British Pathé's John Parsons
Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) English theologian
Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.287
William Feller (1906–1970) Croatian-American mathematician
Introduction, The Nature of Probability Theory, p. 6.
An Introduction To Probability Theory And Its Applications (Third Edition)