70 Quotes Tagged: cynicism

The public is always relieved to find that once the chief officers of state are elected they do not sincerely want change.

Cynicism is the greatest barrier to love. It is rooted in doubt and despair. Fear intensifies our doubt. It paralyzes. Faith and hope allow us to let go. Fear stands in the way of love.

Cynicism makes you feel smart, I know it, even when you aren't smart.

It's weird, marriage. It's like this license that gives a person the legal right to control their spouse / their 'other half.

Interstellar transport for surplus people presents an musing perspective. Since the ships would take generations to reach most stars, the only people who could be transported would be those willing to exercise strict birth control. Population explosions on space ships would be disastrous. Thus we would have to export our responsible people, leaving the irresponsible at home on Earth to breed.

"So basically you're sticking around to watch us all fuck up ?"
"Yes. It's one of life's few guaranteed constants."

Fundamental belief consoled him for superficial irony.

Now, he told me, I could see what humanity was worth. It could form the conception of justice, but could not trust its flesh to provide judges. Whatever it started was likely to end in old men raving. There was ruin everywhere and we should see more of it.

You know, the Philistines have long since discarded the rack and stake as a means of suppressing the opinions they feared: they've discovered a much more deadly weapon of destruction — the wisecrack.

No matter how cynical you become, it's never enough to keep up.

As my father always used to tell me, 'You see, son, there's always someone in the world worse off than you.' And I always used to think, 'So?

Idealists and reformers all become executioners in their turn. The road to utopia ends with the steps of the scaffold, the endless moment of the guillotine.

All men have a natural fear of making a mistake — by believing too well of a person. However, the error of believing too ill of a person is perhaps not feared, at least not in the same degree as the other.

I do not snivel that snivel the world over,
That months are vacuums and the ground but wallow and filth,
That life is a suck and a sell, and nothing remains at the end but threadbare crape and tears.

Life is not an easy matter…. You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.