“Although born within our subjective consciousness, the image of perfection expressed in the ideal points to an objective quality: through the ideal, man’s latent qualities tend to orient themselves outward and transform into acts and works in the world. The ideal is the path by which individual aspirations for happiness flow into the already-open furrows of external reality, leaving the glass dome of dreams and taking shape upon the greater stage of facts and things. Without a defined ideal, even the noblest aspirations remain mere dreams, because there is no immanent moral duty demanding they conform to reality, narrowing in scope so they may be realized in depth. Only the idealist is a realist; the others are either dreamers or cynics. Lacking a measure of what things ought to be, they see them as either better or worse than they are.”

—Olavo de Carvalho, The Abandonment of Ideals (1987)