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 has been stimulated by politicians who have realized that it is possible to win power by recruiting the most economically...

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 your woman is, that you come back to in the intervals between a greater love – the only real love...

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 kinds of perfidy and baseness.

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 things go wrong for them, they consequently adopt the inverse attitude.

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 old men raving. There was ruin everywhere and we should see more of it.

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 them.

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, never takes its sophistries seriously, but only its practical aims, which are concealed beneath these sophistries. Political rhetoric and sophistries...

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.

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 extended periods of time. I’m all right with them for a little while, but once you get past around a...

But with man the case is otherwise, in that when logic leads to any humiliating conclusion, the sole effect is to discredit logic.

He said cynicism’s self-protection, a defense mechanism used by cowards who give up on love because they’re afraid love’s given up on them.

But I was naturally suspicious; it comes from working too closely with the police for too long. Cynicism is so contagious.

Wish in one hand, shit in the other, see which one fills up faster.

It appeared as if the whole world was one elaborate system, opposed to justice and kindness, and set to making cruelty and pain.

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...

By the time you swear you’re his,Shivering and sighing.And he vows his passion is,Infinite, undying.Lady make note of this –One of you is lying.

I fight cynicism. It`s too easy. It`s really boring. It`s much harder to be positive and see the wonder of everything. Cynicism is a bunch of people who aren`t as talented as other people, knocking them because they make them feel even more untalented.

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

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

Those are pretty rough numbers, the level of cynicism. He just has not communicated with voters in making his case.

I think cynicism often disguises itself as humour.

Everyone else felt the need to assure me that Mother’s death was part of God’s plan. Exactly, I wanted to shout after reading this sentiment half a dozen times— his plan is to kill us all, and if an innocent child dies in agony and a wicked man breathes his last at an advanced age...

For years, I had used these fractured men to justify my cynicism and workaholism, and the grief, insomnia and casual anorexia were no longer of any interest to me.

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...

Every ounce of my cynicism is supported by historical precedent.

I take in his smooth cheeks, his rough chin and jaw, the developing wrinkles at the corners of his eyes.’We fall in love with somebody who maybe seems like a bad match,’ Tully says, ‘and our friends run around saying ‘What does he see in her?’ What he sees in her is what’s hidden from...