Quotes About Cynicism

You can crab over the morning paper and kick the shins of the guy in the next seat at the movies and feel mean and discouraged and sneer at the politicians but there are a lot of nice people in the world just the same.

Don't be a hero, young man. There's no percentage in it.

Maybe it's the TV commercials. They make you hate everything they try to sell. God, they must think the public is a halfwit. Every time some jerk in a white coat with a stethoscope hanging around his neck holds up some toothpaste or a pack of cigarettes or a bottle of beer or a mouthwash or a jar of shampoo or a little box of something that makes a fat wrestler smell like mountain lilac I always make note never to buy any. Hell, I wouldn't buy the product even if I liked it.

She's a charming middle-aged lady with a face like a bucket of mud and if she has washed her hair since Coolidge's second term, I'll eat my spare tire, rim and all.

There are days like that. Everybody you meet is a dope. You begin to look at yourself in the glass and wonder.

The thin man had a tight voice that expected to be lied to. (The King in Yellow)

Cynicism is, first of all, a style of presenting oneself, and more than anything, cynics take pride in not being fooled and not being foolish. But in the forms in which I encounter it, cynicism is frequently both of those things.

Naïve cynicism loves itself more than the world; it defends itself in lieu of defending the world. I'm interested in the people who love the world more, and in what they have to tell us.

Critical thinking without hope is cynicism, but hope without critical thinking is naïvete," the Bulgarian writer Maria Popova recently remarked.

Tour operators and professional guides, more concerned with profit than with safety, have turned a spiritual quest into a cold-blooded accomplishment. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde's definition of a cynic, everyone knows the price of the highest peak in the world, and no one knows its value.

Some guys - a lot of guys - don't believe what they are seeing, especially if it gets in the way of what they eat or drink or think or believe. Me, I don't believe in God. But if I saw him, I would. I wouldn't just go around saying 'Jesus, that was a great special effect.' The definition of an asshole is a guy who doesn't believe what he's seeing. And you can quote me.

Die Definition eines Arschlochs ist ein Mensch, der nicht glaubt, was er sieht.

I guess some people lived like Reader's Digest, but I hadn't met any and at that time it seemed doubtful that I ever would

There's no possibility of being witty without a little ill-nature.

H. L. Mencken, again with characteristic cynicism, defined conscience as the inner voice that warns us that someone may be looking.

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

In fact I thought life was pretty much a losing proposition, and I didn't mind saying so.

think, Raquel, you'd cut the laugh out of a toddler's throat with a blunt scalpel if you thought you could sell it for cab fare.

Sarcasm is irony which has lost its soul

I was a normal eighteen-year-old: shuttered, self-conscious, untravelled and sneering; violently educated, socially crass, emotionally blurting.

I always doubt people... I've survived by not believing in other human beings.

Mas o cinismo persistente deixa uma pessoa rabugenta e, em demasia, pode provocar estragos duradouros no nosso coração.

Ma o cinismo persistente deixa uma pessoa rabugenta e, em demasia, pode provocar estragos duradouros no nosso coração.

Men in general, the sisters concluded, were gullible but not to be trusted, greedy but frivolous with money, predatory but easily trapped.