Cynicism is easy. Mimicry is easy. Optimistic contrarians are the rarest breed.

A lot of these activists weren’t even registered voters.

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

The sun?” Goldman said in an unguarded moment. “I hear they’ve shot it.

You maintain hope for humanity as an infinite skeptic of gossip and slander. In all mankind’s desires for entertainment and exaggeration and sensationalism, when it comes to gossip, the individual always sounds worse than he...

A true rationalist ought to be effective in the real world.

For a year, Johnny lived the new, brutal truth that he was on his own.But that’s the way it was. What had been concrete one day proved sand the next; strength was illusion; faith meant...

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

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

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

Cynicism is the easiest of all reactions, right? But it’s also so disappointing and self-defeating.

I want my time to be taken up by chores, errands, appointments, and arguments. In other words, I want to get married.

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)...

Cynicism-the pus from a wound.

Nobody is driven by abstractions like ‘seeking truth.

We have conquered our own cynicism,

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.

One simple answer is that there has been a massive rise in the incidence of sanctimony and smugness among the successful that has nothing to do with any change in the underlying reality. Rather, it...

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

Home? What is home? Home is where a house is that you come back to when the rainy season is about to begin, to wait until the next dry season comes around. Home is where...

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

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...

Scratch the surface of most cynics and you find a frustrated idealist — someone who made the mistake of converting his ideals into expectations.

Life is a very terrible thing, mostly, with points of wonder and beauty. Most of what makes it terrible, though, is simply that there’s so much of it, blaring in through the five senses.

If there was anything that depressed him more than his own cynicism, it was that quite often it still wasn’t as cynical as real life.

Derision, cynicism, prejudice, stereotyping and hunger for stories of failure than of success will be the undoing of democratic progress on the continent.

Scratch any cynic and you will find a disappointed idealist.

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

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

[N]obody is a greater schoolgirl in spirit than a cynic. Cynics can not relinquish the rubbish they were taught as children: they hold tight to the belief that the word [sic] has meaning and, when...

If you’re always worried about crushing the ants beneath you… you won’t be able to walk.

Skepticism relieved two terrible diseases that afflicted mankind: anxiety and dogmatism.

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.

What were you like,” I asked her. “we’re you happy? Or were you smiling because they told you to?

It all depends on what people you’re talking about helping. That’s the wonderful think about just about every religion on the planet – they’re all so incredibly selfish.

Cynicism is when a small mind and a hurt heart rejects the hope, love, and truth of a big and caring God.

People grow bitter and cynical about life because they can’t bend it to their will.

Find the one thing you love and shut up about it.

I am discovering that I can live far better without cynicism than I can without trust.

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...

The everyday was king. And the courtiers were popularization, superficiality, doubt, cynicism. The century was exhausted.

Only a cynic can create horror–for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving demonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock...

Genius moves to creation, not to destruction. Only a very few have combined both.

Spet to z vesoljem. Vse misli prejšne noči me nekako niso naredile manj umrljivega. Če je vesolje začasno si hitro misliš, da je človeško življenje nesmiselno. Zakaj bi se soloh česa lotil?

Too much faith is the worst ally. When you believe in something literally, through your faith you’ll turn it into something absurd. One who is a genuine adherent, if you like, of some political outlook,...

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,...

If this was cynical, then we must allow that all courtship is cynical.

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.

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

You wouldn’t know it, from some of the things I’ve said over the years, but I like people… I do… I like people, but I like them in short bursts. I don’t like people for...