America must be the teacher of democracy, not the advertiser of the consumer society. It is unrealistic for the rest of the world to reach the American living standard.

As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.

I think that 'Elysium' the movie is unrealistic, with the space station and everything. I think 'Elysium' the metaphor is completely realistic: it's exactly where we're going.

One of the definitions of sanity is the ability to tell real from unreal. Soon we'll need a new definition.

America to me is so varied and exciting. I always feel nostalgia for the place I'm not in, and then I get there and find myself in a traffic jam going into the Lincoln Tunnel, and I think, 'God, why was I romanticizing this part of the country?' I think it has to do with the romantic, unrealistic temperament.

I had these kind of unrealistic expectations that were fueled by romantic comedies, and it has both helped me and hurt me in many ways. It helped me because, in general, they've made me hopeful. I just figure things will eventually work out for me. But nobody is like any Tom Hanks character. Nobody is Hugh Grant. No one is Meg Ryan!

People sometimes say the way things happen in the movies is unreal, but actually, it's the way things happen to you in life that's unreal.

I think there's a vague sense out there that movies are becoming more and more unreal. I know I've felt it.

Under the leadership of this President, the state of the union is not strong. We are being pulled apart rather than pulling together. Our democracy is suffering from the choices being made, and yet we are offered the same tired excuses and unrealistic analyses.

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.

Nothing is more dangerous to one's own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of that faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate.

The dream is real, my friends. The failure to realize it is the only unreality.

There something to be said for having even unrealistic dreams. Even if the dreams don't come true - that, to me, is what's beautiful about Los Angeles. It's full of these people who have moved there to chase these dreams.

Given the importance of Washington, outsiders probably have an unrealistic perspective on how large the city is. The fact is, Washington D.C. is a small town, and most everyone knows most everyone else. That person of the other party who you despise will someday be at your daughter's birthday party.

I am not trying to conform to an unrealistic model of beauty. I am, however, being proactive in being the healthiest I can be.

Once in a while, I still witness occasionally sexist behavior and comments from men (which experience has taught me you should always deflect with humour rather than anger). Old habits die hard, after all, and it's unrealistic to expect dinosaurs to fall silent overnight.

Wilting flowers do not cause suffering. It is the unrealistic desire that flowers not wilt that causes suffering.

Your visions on a dark path transcend where no foot permits. Throughout life, approach the unreal, and culminate care in nature. Awaken your hidden totality.

The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented.

Want of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed. By imagination I mean knowledge and love. I mean compassion. People of power kill children, the old send the young to die, because they have no imagination. They have power. Can you have power and imagination at the same time? Can you kill people you don't know and have compassion for them at the same time?

We can't believe what we believe to be untrue, and we can't love what we believe to be unreal.

Upset by two nostalgias facing each other like two mirrors, he lost his marvelous sense of unreality and he ended up recommending to all of them that they leave Macondo, that they forget everything he had taught them about the world and the human heart, that they shit on Horace, and that wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.

You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion. ... The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that -- well, lucky you.