"Idealists foolish enough to throw caution to the winds have advanced mankind and have enriched the world"
About this Quote
Progress, Goldman implies, is usually driven by the kind of people respectable society loves to sneer at. By calling them "idealists foolish enough", she borrows the voice of the prudent critic and then flips it: the so-called foolishness is precisely the engine of history. The line works because it stages a moral ambush. If you prize "mankind" being advanced and the world enriched, you have to admit the debt you owe to those you were trained to dismiss as reckless.
The subtext is an attack on caution as a civic virtue. "Caution" sounds like wisdom, but in Goldman’s frame it’s also compliance: the instinct to keep your head down, protect your status, and not disturb the arrangement that benefits you. Throwing it "to the winds" isn’t just romantic abandon; it’s strategic defiance of a system that counts on fear - of police, bosses, public shame - to keep dissent manageable.
Context sharpens the stakes. Goldman lived in an era of labor uprisings, anarchist organizing, state surveillance, deportations, and the routine criminalization of radicals. Idealism wasn’t a Pinterest moodboard; it could cost you your job, your freedom, your country. So the sentence doubles as both defense and recruitment pitch: yes, you will be mocked as naive, and yes, the world you want will still require the naive.
She’s also smuggling in a critique of liberal incrementalism. The world gets "enriched" not by polite reforms alone but by people willing to look unreasonable until the unreasonable becomes common sense.
The subtext is an attack on caution as a civic virtue. "Caution" sounds like wisdom, but in Goldman’s frame it’s also compliance: the instinct to keep your head down, protect your status, and not disturb the arrangement that benefits you. Throwing it "to the winds" isn’t just romantic abandon; it’s strategic defiance of a system that counts on fear - of police, bosses, public shame - to keep dissent manageable.
Context sharpens the stakes. Goldman lived in an era of labor uprisings, anarchist organizing, state surveillance, deportations, and the routine criminalization of radicals. Idealism wasn’t a Pinterest moodboard; it could cost you your job, your freedom, your country. So the sentence doubles as both defense and recruitment pitch: yes, you will be mocked as naive, and yes, the world you want will still require the naive.
She’s also smuggling in a critique of liberal incrementalism. The world gets "enriched" not by polite reforms alone but by people willing to look unreasonable until the unreasonable becomes common sense.
Quote Details
| Topic | Motivational |
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