Quotes About Cynicism

As there are misanthropists or haters of men, so also are there misologists, or haters of ideas.

Sure men were born to lie, and women to believe them!

A pessimist is a man who looks both ways when he crosses the street.

It takes a clever man to turn cynic and a wise man to be clever enough not to.

Cynicism such as one finds very frequently among the most highly educated young men and women of the West, results from the combination of comfort and powerlessness.

It is evident that skepticism, while it makes no actual change in man, always makes him feel better.

The worst of marriage is that it makes a woman believe that all men are just as easy to fool.

No man ever quite believes in any other man.

Cynicism and naivety lie cheek by jowl in the American imagination if the United States is one of the most venal nations on Earth, it is also one of the most earnestly idealistic.

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.

But what if the novels were right? What if sentimentality was closer to the truth of life and cynicism was the evasion

To have made up your mind from the beginning that everything people do is spoiled and bad and ugly. Really, I can't separate it from someone who believes in original sin. It's the new doctrine of original sin, environmentalism: the sins of the technological revolutions shall be visited upon the children until the nth generation. You believe the worst, so you never have to be disappointed. It's so cowardly, really.

There is laughter because there is nothing to laugh at.

Among today's adept practitioners, the lie has long since lost its honest function of misrepresenting reality. Nobody believes anybody, everyone is in the know. Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion. The lie, once a liberal means of communication, has today become one of the techniques of insolence enabling each individual to spread around him the glacial atmosphere in whose shelter he can thrive.

The need always to lie and always to avoid the truth stripped everyone of what Custine called 'the two greatest gifts of God—the soul and the speech which communicates it.' People became hypocritical, cunning, mistrustful, cynical, silent, cruel, and indifferent to the fate of others as a result of the destruction of their own souls.

People are negative no matter what you do.

The French have only negative things to say about everything and everyone.

When I was 16, 17, 18 years old, I felt like I had seen it all and done it all, and I was really kind of negative about everything.

The world is all alike. Those that seem better than their neighbours are only more artful. They mean the same thing, though they take a different road.

I went to high school in New York City. So, I grew up in New Jersey my whole life, and I was watching all the people and all the kids that I met there become so jaded.

I think if you see that no one is going to laugh at you for it, I think the concept of living nicely will be infectious. I believe there is room for the absence of cynicism.

He'd simply been around long enough to know that fairy tales seldom came true

Per i romantici questa è una storia d'amore; i cinici la definirebbero una tragedia. Nella mia mente è un po' tutt'e due le cose, e comunque si voglia interpretarne la fine, non cambia il fatto che ha coinvolto una grande parte della mia esistenza.

That is another chamber of my heart that shows no electrical activity - the chamber that used to flicker into life when I saw a film that moved me, or read a book that inspired me, or listened to music that made me want to cry. I closed that chamber myself, for all the usual reasons. And now I seem to have made a pact with some philistine devil: if I don't attempt to re-open it, I will be allowed just enough energy and optimism to get through a working day without wanting to hang myself.