Cynicism Quotes

She (historian Barbara Tuchman) draws on skepticism, not cynicism, leaving the reader not so much outraged by human ability as amused and saddened by human folly.

Everyone is a little bitter. We're born bitter. The personality itself is really just a very complex defense mechanism. A reaction to the first time someone said, "No you can't.

His friend laughed. 'You missed your calling, Freddie,' he said. 'You should have been one of the aforementioned clergy. Is this what marriage does to you? One shudders at the very idea.

In Paris, where raillery is so quick to throw emotion out the window, silence, in a roomful of clever people after a story, is the most flattering of all marks of success

The dark war consciousness and pride have seized upon the weak, with great cynicisms and glib, soulless intellects, that grind away like robotic gears at what they despise and can never understand.

It is a well-known fact that very often, putting the period of boyhood out of the argument, the older we grow the more cynical and hardened we become; indeed, many of us are only saved by timely death from moral petrification, if not from moral corruption.

There is this common notion that people are shallow and ignorant until they go out and see the world. I, on the other hand, went out and in comparison realized I was in pretty good standing.

He had a look of composed dissatisfaction, as if he understood life thoroughly.

Pride is born as a mountaintop on a valley, but dies as an abyss in which it is too deep and too dark to see the better.

It is not that I am mad, it is only that my head is different from yours.

The atmosphere was electrified by the orgasm with which the strong and secure are overcome when confronted with the visible frailty of someone worse off than themselves.

Preferring the nausea of the path to its fated and certain ending.

And you that sought for magic in your youth but desire it not in your age, know that there is a blindness of spirit which comes from age, more black than the blindness of eye, making a darkness about you across which nothing may be seen, or felt, or known, or in any way apprehended.

On the brink of sleep I have a gloomy thought: that saving yourself is only pushing yourself even deeper into the trap rather than getting out. Dying is the only way out.

Has anybody ever told you you’re a remarkably cynical person?”“I like to think of it as learning from experience.

Cynicism is a boring and dull old man’s disease people have no business getting when they’re young.

A cynic can chill and dishearten with a single word.

It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little.

Poverty is a virtue which one can teach oneself.

An idea? An idea won't get you nothing but another idea. You need money, cash, to make anything happen in this doggone world.

Recognising clichés is a sign of aging.

America is a country in which I see the most persistant idealism and the blandest of cynicism and the race is on between its vitality and its decadence.

I am a citizen of the world.

Show me somebody who is always smiling, always cheerful, always optimistic, and I will show you somebody who hasn't the faintest idea what the heck is really going on.

Cynicism places the cynic at the center seat of judgement with the self appointed authority to criticize and condemn.

The world has become jaded. Romance has died, some no longer believe in love, and because of this, they suffer.

To be naive is to be unaware of how stupid and cruel other people are; but, by some definitions, ignorance is nearly the opposite of naivety in being a kind of cynicism, in being unaware of their intelligence and humanity. It seems to be a normal although unfortunate case that the great many of us consciously abhor ignorance in others yet subconsciously practice it ourselves: as naivety is apparent and well-known to inflict its damage upon oneself; whereas the alternative and the easier, ignorance, its damage upon others.

Cynicism is a disease. Optimism is the cure.

A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Seeing the mud around a lotus is pessimism, seeing a lotus in the mud is optimism.

cynicism springs from disappointments in love.

Cynicism! That, no doubt is a greater crime than heresy.

Life is such unutterable hell, solely because it is sometimes beautiful. If we could only be miserable all the time, if there could be no such things as love or beauty or faith or hope, if I could be absolutely certain that my love would never be returned: how much more simple life would be. One could plod through the Siberian salt mines of existence without being bothered about happiness.

It's nice to be able to do things for other people, isn't it?That's why it's fun to talk in the third person sometimes.

A man may have ‘his moment,’ and that moment endure for decades, or only for the few seconds it takes for a bullet to travel across a courtyard to the balcony upon which he stands as he exhorts his people to follow him.

The virtues about marriage were mostly negative virtues. Being unmarried in a man's world was such a hassle that anything had to be better. Marriage was better. But not much. Damned clever, I thought, how men had made life so intolerable for single women that most would gladly embrace even bad marriages instead.

Cynicism always comes clothed in "realism". The alternatives to begin with an act of imagination. Can we imagine another way?

Maybe he wasn’t there to lead so much as to provide an illusion to the others that they were being led.

Within he felt that faint stirring of derision for the whole business of life which is the salt of the American mentality. Outwardly they are sentimental and enthusiastic and inwardly they are profoundly cynical.

What good is ye world when ye canst not livest hither.

The cynic is one who never sees a good quality in a man and never fails to see a bad one. He is the human owl vigilant in darkness and blind to light mousing for vermin and never seeing noble game. The cynic puts all human actions into two classes - openly bad and secretly bad.

I think this goes more to the idea of 'relentless irony' than 'divine providence.

People want to feel good, be entertained, eat salty shit, and cum twice a week, and provided they do they'll stay quiet.

It doesn't matter if justice is on your side. You have to depict your position as just.

All I ask is one thing, and I’m asking this particularly of young people: please don’t be cynical. I hate cynicism, for the record, it’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.

I sometimes think that 'friend' is just a word I use for all the people I haven't murdered yet.

Cynicism, like gullibility, is a symptom of underdeveloped critical faculties.

You see, cancer is simply nature's way of making you want to die.'Tatsu.

Stir not the bitterness in the cup that I mixed for myself,' said Denethor. 'Have I not tasted it now many nights upon my tongue, foreboding that worse lay in the dregs?

Cynicism - the intellectual cripple's substitute for intelligence.

Remember, you cannot be both young and wise. Young people who pretend to be wise to the ways of the world are mostly just cynics. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us. Cynics always say no. But saying “yes” begins things. Saying “yes” is how things grow. Saying “yes” leads to knowledge. “Yes” is for young people. So for as long as you have the strength to, say “yes'.

You're such a cynic," Molly said."I think cynics are playful and cute.

[T]he enduring problem for liberals, as for everyone else, is not whether history will judge them wise or foolish regarding the war on terrorism; it is, rather, the way that the past decade has splintered them away from other Americans. This fracture comes with a steep price: in today's toxic atmosphere, liberals are no less cynical, shortsighted, and parochial than anyone else, and they understand their fellow-Americans just as badly as they themselves are understood. When liberals look at red-state voters, they see either a mob of pious know-nothings or the insensible victims of militarism and class warfare. Yet.... [such people] defy fixed categories, which means that they have to be figured out the hard way--on their own terms.

Fundamental belief consoled him for superficial irony.

motivating people, forcing them to your will, gives you a cynical attitude toward humanity. It degrades everything it touches.

Can you ever "solve" disease, unemployment, war, or any other societal herpes? Hell no. All you can hope for is to make them manageable enough to allow people to get on with their lives. That's not cynicism, that's maturity.

Cynicism is intellectual dandyism without the coxcomb's feathers.

Life is serious but art is fun!

I work hard to stay cynical enough! I keep my expectations of our culture and our leaders low, low, low, and I do it so I don't have to be let down. And yet again I am lowballed by the brokenness of the American cultural machine.

It is unfortunate that for some, kindness is an unwarranted expenditure, compassion an avoidable weakness, and love an unnecessary gamble.