Quotes about cynicism

To disbelieve is easy to scoff is simple to have faith is harder.

I think that all the anger and cynicism comes from suppressing things that we always wanted.

But history does repeat itself that is the comedy and the crime of history. Men learn nothing. Times change. Scenes change. Names change. But passions are the same.

You cynical shit," he told himself. Then he started to weep."Don't be so fucking sentimental," Crake used to tell him. But why not? Why shouldn't he be sentimental? It wasn't as if there was anyone around to question his

Failure generates its own majesty. Defeat becomes a panoptic stain on the soul; it creates its own all-embracing pathos. Reverses engulf us in fleshy feelings of self-pity, sorrow, and apathy. Resounding setbacks might even be subtlety attractive because it means we can give up trying. It is tempting to accept defeat, surrender to our insecurities, and admit that because of failing to accomplish one particular goal that the best part of our life was wasted. Cynically writing ourselves off as a f

We are all cynics now, I suppose, and even a mewling infant knows that to save a life is to make an eternal enemy.

Ignore cynicism, appreciate criticism, and embrace optimism.

Your every ill-thought, secreted hate, cynical and vicious judgment you carry is meant only for you.

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

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

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.

Didn't Chains tell you about the Golden Theological Principle?""The what?""The single congruent aspect of every known religion. The one shared, universal assumption about the human condition.""What is it?""He said that life boils down to standing in line to get shit dropped on your head. Everyone's got a place in the queue, you can't get out of it, and just when you start to congratulate yourself on surviving your dose of shit, you discover that line is actually circular.

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.

They tugged plans and ambitions out their asses and held tight to the first that didn't smell so strongly of shit.

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

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.

Capitalism needs war.

Possibly, some cynic, at once merry and bitter, had desired to signify, in this pantomimic scene, that we mortals, whatever our business or amusement--however serious, however trifling--all dance to one identical tune, and, in spite of our ridiculous activity, bring nothing finally to pass.

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

The author describes the critic within us as adults as "the selves who live too much in their heads rather than their bodies, who are burdened with too much knowledge about how the world works rather than excited about how it could work or should, who are afraid of being judged and not being loved. Most adults do not live in a world of forgiveness and unconditional love, unless, that is, they have small children.

We discover truth by asking rapier-like questions that cut through the thick fog of doctrinarism. Artists and philosophers must be subversive: we need these rebellious cynics to ask questions, they must resist cultural norms; seek out truths that are not self-evident and challenge everything. Doubt, not blind belief, is essential for discovering truth.

Certainty. Life's last and kindest gift.

... drink levels all mankind. It is the ultimate democrat

We are literally in the heart of Jesus," he said."I thought we were in a church basement, but we are literally in the heart of Jesus.""Someone should tell Jesus," I said. "I mean, it's gotta be dangerous, storing children with cancer in your heart.

Nihilism, cynicism, sarcasm, and orgasm.

His age was indeterminate. But in cynicism and general world weariness, which is a sort of carbon dating of the personality, he was about seven thousand years old.

Cynicism is one of the terrible obstacles to progress.

His one essay in love had exhausted his powers in that direction.

Fukuyama’s thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious. It should be remembered, though, that even when Fukuyama advanced it, the idea that history had reached a ‘terminal beach’ was not merely triumphalist. Fukuyama warned that his radiant city would be haunted, but he thought its specters would be Nietzschean rather than Marxian. Some of Nietzsche’s most prescient pages are tho

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

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

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.

It's true that Thomas was a doubter, but he was not a cynic, and that's an important distinction. Cynics often look for reasons not to believe and won't be moved by something beautiful—just to make a point—even if it's staring them down. Thomas wasn't a cynic, he was a hopeful doubter; he'd believe if he could.

Maybe your empathy's just a comforting lie, you ever think of that? Maybe you think you know how the other person feels but you're only feeling yourself, maybe you're even worst than me. Or maybe we're all just guessing.

The increasingly cynical court thought Arthur, "hypocritical, as all decent men must be if you assume decency cannot exist.

Oh yes, he's seen the black pupils of time's eyes. Two dark drains in a pair of dirty gas station bathroom sinks. The faucet's open and he's gurgling down the pipes, gushing toward whatever tank he's bound to swirl around in for the rest of his life. There's no telling from here if that's a realm of purification or of shit. There's only one way to find out, and that's to ride it all the way down.

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.

[Rinda] often worried how she might make the coward she saw [in Remus] into a brave warrior, and someday, a king -- a task which she felt was her responsibility. Rinda had not yet realized that sometimes courage is the same thing as folly and that sometimes a skepticism bordering on her blindness to her brother's strengths was a result of her own sensitivity.

If grass grows and withers, it can only mean that it is part of a greater thing, which is even more real; not that the grass is less real than it looks. St. Thomas (Aquinas) has a really logical right to say, in the words of the modern mystic, A. E.: "I begin by the grass to be bound again to the Lord.

I can't bear the thought that a man of lofty mind and heart begins with the ideal of the Madonna and ends with the ideal of Sodom.

Cynicism is often the shamefaced product of inexperience.

Our sole concern with the long dead is aesthetic

In theory man is put at the center of everything but in practice he is barely allowed to sit on the sidelines

You are not a better or wiser person simply because you’ve ceased to care.

How tolerable misfortunes appear when they affect only other people! How strong the human body seems when it's another man's flesh that bleeds! How easy it is to look death in the face when it's another man's turn!

Cronkite was always one step short of disillusionment.

Fundamental belief consoled him for superficial irony.

cynicism springs from disappointments in love.

Cynicism may help us create simpler storylines with good guys and bad guys, but it doesn't make us any better at telling the truth, which is that most of us are a frightening mix of good and evil, sinner and saint.

...[we] has left nothing durable to signalize his stay upon this planet.[we]eventually dies to the honest regret of [our] associates.

I'm not ready to let the youthful part of myself go yet. If maturity means becoming a cynic, if you have to kill the part of yourself that is naive and romantic and idealistic - the part of you that you treasure most - to claim maturity, is it not better to die young but with your humanity intact?

I'm getting old, thought Eileen Calder. Old and worn out and cynical. And being cynical is a lot worse than being old or worn out.

Recognising clichés is a sign of aging.

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

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

[James M. Buchanan] directed hostility toward college students, public employees, recipients of any kind of government assistance, and liberal intellectuals. His intellectual lineage went back to such bitter establishment opponents of Populism as the social Darwinists Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner. The battle between "the oppressed and their oppressors," as one People's Party publication had termed it in 1892, was redefined in his milieu: "the working masses who produce" became busin

When everything seems to be lacking integrity, you find it in yourself.

Life will never meet all of our expectations. We must nonetheless accept all disappointments without becoming bitter and cynical. We must always remain mindful of the opportunity to extend kindness and work to improve our character.

Maybe it's the fact the most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip - and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It's more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcenda

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

Cynicism is a disease. Optimism is the cure.

At first, one only recognizes particular instances to be worth of critique; critique appears synonymous with rejection, implying deficiency in the object. Over time, one discovers that everything warrants critique. This can produce cynicism: nothing is above reproach, nothing is pure, therefore nothing has value. But followed through to its logical conclusion, this insight inspires a profound optimism: if everything can be critiqued, then no matter how bleak things are, there is always a way to

She would put her “naïve American optimism” toward making herself indispensable to him, and she’d win him. Because naïve American optimism beat out English cynicism any day.

It's strange but as I grow older, I find myself developing more optimism. I keep inching toward the point where I believe that it's more difficult to have hope than it is to embrace cynicism. In the deep dark end, there's no point unless we have at least a modicum of hope. We trawl our way through the darkness hoping to find a pinpoint of light. But isn't it remarkable that the cynics of this world—the politicians, the corporations, the squinty-eyed critics—seem to think that they have a claim o

You're confident he'll have found him, then?""Well, no. I didn't sat that.""If there's one thing I hate," Volyova said, looking coldly at the other Triumvir, "it's mindless optimism.

Dantes had entered the Chateau d’If with the round, open, smiling face of a young and happy man, with whom the earlypaths of life have been smooth. and who anticipates a future corresponding with his past. This was now all changed. The oval face was lengthened, his smiling mouth had assumed the firm and markedlines which betoken resolution; his eyebrows were arched beneath a brow furrowed with thought; his eyes were full of melancholy, and from their depths occasionally sparkled gloomy fires of

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.

I thought back to Meg’s advice about Hemingway sentences—simple declarative statements that showed the truth and distilled the meaning. My first attempt at that had been cynical and messed up. I gave it a go again.Find one lost sheep.The angels rejoice.

A calendar was hung in the kitchen as if to say: Expect more of the same.

We shall, as we ripen in grace, have greater sweetness towards our fellow Christians. Bitter-spirited Christians may know a great deal, but they are immature. Those who are quick to censure may be very acute in judgment, but they are as yet very immature in heart. He who grows in grace remembers that he is but dust, and he therefore does not expect his fellow Christians to be anything more; he overlooks ten thousand of their faults, because he knows his God overlooks twenty thousand in his own c

It takes a long time before we cease to feel proud of being wanted. Though God knows why we should feel it, when we look around and see who is wanted too.

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.

They were Archer's second set of children an d paragons of contemporary teenage cynicism. They enjoyed setting fire to the tails of tender thoughts.

The foolishness of youth with the cynicism of age is a dangerous combination.

Ah, those foolish days, those foolish days when we were unselfish and pure-minded; those foolish days when our simple hearts were full of truth, and faith, and reverence! Ah, those foolish days of noble longings and of noble strivings! And oh, these wise, clever days when we know that money is the only prize worth striving for, when we believe in nothing else but meanness and lies, when we care for no living creature but ourselves!

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 wouldn’t be caught dead sacrificing myself for this country.

Having in our childhood felt primal awe for the spectacle of the holiday, we are told to age into feeling sullen and resentful. You are supposed to proclaim Santa dead like preadolescent Nietzsches and decry the whole month as an orgy of crass commercialism.

I lost something magical in the process of growing up – my disillusionment.

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

It's like this with us baby. We're coppers and everybody hates our guts....nothing we do is right, not ever. If we get a confession we beat it out of a guy, they say, and some shyster lawyer calls us Gestapo.

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

If you try to convert someone, it will never be toeffect his salvation but to make him suffer like yourself,to be sure he is exposed to the same ordeals andendures them with the same impatience. You keepwatch, you pray, you agonize-provided he does too,sighing, groaning, beset by the same tortures that areracking you. Intolerance is the work of ravaged soulswhose faith comes down to a more or less deliberatetorment they would like to see generalized, instituted.The happiness of others never havi

Out of the mouths of babes comes only bubbles. Out of the mouths of men like me, only babble.

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

A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past he is one who is prematurely disappointed in the future.

Cynicism is humour in ill health.

Cynicism such as one finds very frequently among the most highly educated young men and women of the West results from the combination of comfort and powerlessness.

A cynic is a man who when he smells flowers looks around for a coffin.

Cynicism - the intellectual cripple's substitute for intelligence.

Cynicism is that blackguard defect of vision which compels us to see the world as it is instead of as it should be.

Cynicism is intellectual dandyism without the coxcomb's feathers.

There is nothing to which men while they have food and drink cannot reconcile themselves.

It's not that the Irish are cynical. It's rather that they have a wonderful lack of respect for everything and everybody.

Watch what people are cynical about and one can often discover what they lack.

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

A cynic can chill and dishearten with a single word.

We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion just as effectively as by bombs.

Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.