Quotes About Cynicism

I have learned that there is no such thing as one portrait or one story, only the knowledge of our own experience shared. I no longer see America's national parks as 'our best idea,' but our evolving idea; I see our national parks as our ongoing struggle as a diverse people to create circles of reverence in a time of collective cynicism where we are wary of being moved by anything but our own clever perspective.

To not be engaged in the democratic process, to sit back and let others do the work for us, is to fall prey to bitterness and cynicism. It is the passivity of cynicism that has broken the back of our collective outrage. We succumb to our own depression believing there is nothing we can do.

I'm a dinosaur, he thought, lumbering through a world where truthtellers are despised.

Life is a God-damned, stinking, treacherous game and nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a thousand are bastards.

I have long believed that there are fundamentally two forces or emotions that drive our decisions - love and fear. Love has its many manifestations: compassion, gratitude, kindness, and joy. Fear often manifests in cynicism, anger, jealousy, and anxiety. I worry that many of our communities are being driven by fear.

Right. And soon sentient beings will stop destroying one another and themselves. Not. We're all going to die. Alone and miserably. With lots of pain. That's the way life goes. People make promises and don't keep them. They say they care about you and forget you." "I didn't forget you. I never forget you

The devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people meaner.

Cynicism is intelectual dandyism, but graciousness in speech is an aphrodisiac. (Andy Spade)

I'm honest. It's the world that's awful - Sandor Clegane, The Hound. ASOIAF

Rosie crosses her arm. "That's one of those things you say to sound smart, right?" she says. "But, really, you're trying to make someone else feel stupid.

He found himself uttering a series of "excuse mes" that he did not mean. A truly magnificent thing about the way the brain was coded, Sam thought, was that it could say "Excuse me" while meaning "Screw you.

He never understood when she said that if she went to a doctor, the doctor would only invent a disease that would explain why he couldn't help her.

Solo, tell me what you want; I'll get it for you, I swear! You're a guy who looks out for number one, aren't you? Isn't that what you are, Solo?" Han stared at his own lean reflection. In another man, he'd have said those eyes were too used to concealing everything but cynicism.

Politics disgusts me.

Growing up can really suck, he thought. And bad things sure as shit do happen to good people and for the most part the world just doesn't give a crap.

The exit in a blaze of glory is bullshit.

There is a certain threshold, an intensity of sin and cynicism, beyond which no society can survive.…

Because positivism (which repudiated the possibility of a theological or metaphysical explanation of reality) had failed, all that was left for secular society was "cynicism or some mystical leap to knowing.

I don't like either party. I believe even the best politicians can be self-serving hypocrites.

1) Never trust a cop in a raincoat. 2) Beware of enthusiasm and of love, both are temporary and quick to sway. 3) If asked if you care about the world's problems, look deep into the eyes of he who asks, he will never ask you again. 4) Never give your real name. 5) If ever asked to look at yourself, don't look. 6) Never do anything the person standing in front of you can't understand. 7) Never create anything, it will be misinterpreted, it will chain you and follow you for the rest of your life.

There is a beautiful consistency about Buzzard; he is a porcupine among men, with his quills always flared. If he won a new car with a raffle ticket bought in his name by some momentary girlfriend, he would recognize it at once as a trick to con him out of a license fee. He would denounce the girl as a hired slut, beat up the raffle sponsor, and trade off the car for five hundred Seconals and a gold-handled cattle prod.

Hubert Humphrey is a treacherous, gutless old ward-heeler who should be put in a goddamn bottle and sent out with the Japanese current.

He never stooped to trying to sell us on stupidities about electability and realism, or the pitfalls of purity. Instead, he stared right into the flaming-hot sun of shameless lies and cynical horseshit that is our politics, and he described exactly what he saw - probably at serious cost to his own mental health, but he benefit to is was Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72.

Both McGovern and Wallace, he said, draw on the same pool of extremely alienated blue-collar voters, a group that is constantly getting deeper into bitterness, cynicism, and resentment about the current government.