Top 96 Cynical People Quotes
#1. I'm sure some cynical people would point to that as the main reason for doing it for a lot of people.
Jo Brand
#2. I think if you're a regular viewer of Fox News, you're among the most cynical people on planet Earth. I cannot think of a more cynical slogan than 'Fair and Balanced.'
Bill Keller
#3. Before children, even the most cynical people throw down their usual masks and become capable of feeling the purity and love which all human beings seek.
Sun Myung Moon
#4. A well governed people are generally a people who do not think much.
Andre Siegfried
#5. It is time to let America be America again. To return freedom to the people. To stand on our founding principles and reject the cynical politics of the Nanny State.
Rick Perry
#6. I believe that people, more often than not, act with the best possible intentions. And when they don't, that's funny to me. That's why comedy ends up seeming cynical, because you're talking about the gap between what people say and what they do.
Stephen Colbert
#7. Law enforcement hardened you. It made you cynical about people. Even people you loved. The people who deserved your unconditional trust.
Josh Lanyon
#8. People like Bill Maher, who brags about being a cynic, it sickens me. I am the least cynical person I know, and I am very, very skeptical.
Penn Jillette
#9. This may sound a cynical thing to say, but don't you think men sometimes leave difficulties to be solved by other people or to solve themselves? After
Barbara Pym
#10. You know, it's fashionable right now for people to be cynical. We go in cycles like this and right now a lot of people are saying, 'Oh, America is doing terribly' and 'What are we going to do?'
Barack Obama
#11. I think the people who are making Christmas-themed movies today feel that people are more cynical about Christmas. There's more of an edge.
Leonard Maltin
#12. I really ought to try and make a film that's a bit more cynical. But I don't think I'd know how to do it. I think what it is, is that if you're a film director, you're basically there because you enjoy manipulating people's emotions.
Nigel Cole
#13. I'm the most cynical person, and I know what that sounds like when you say, I don't drink and drive, and I don't. But I know people look at that with skepticism, and I understand.
Tracey Gold
#14. You're all terrified of young people. We remind you of what it was like to have ideals, faith, freedom. We remind you of the losses you've taken as you've grown cynical, numb, disenchanted, compromising the life you imagined.
Stephanie Danler
#15. What I'm doing in here isn't all that different from what I was doing outside. I'll hand you a pretty cynical axiom: the amount of financial help an individual or company needs rises in direct proportion to how many people that person or business is screwing.
Stephen King
#16. I think I've finally proven something to people who were cynical about me. Because they were cruel.
Nancy Sinatra
#17. I think I'm too cynical for L.A. My sense of humor doesn't go down well here, which probably affects my love life. I need to have a laugh track following me around so people know I'm trying to be funny.
Teddy Thompson
#18. You write who you are somehow. Even if you try to not to. You can't help but write who you are. I'm just not a very cynical person. I believe in the humanity of people, whether it is just the guys in 'The Full Monty' or Aron Ralston.
Simon Beaufoy
#19. I hate when people say, 'Oh, they laughed all the way to the bank.' That's nonsense because the most cynical, unhappy people are Hollywood screenwriters. They earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for work that's never made.
Susan Isaacs
#20. If you stare at someone long enough, they'll eventually look back at you.
Cory Doctorow
#21. You know, many people have called me, friends from the nationalist camp, revisionists and so on, from around the world, have called me over the years - and now again because of what happened - and they are all very cynical about the police and the authorities.
Ernst Zundel
#22. People think it's easy to be cynical and pessimistic, but it's incredibly hard work. It's much easier to be hopeful.
Michael Robotham
#23. People tend to become cynical about even the most appalling crisis if it seems to be dragging on, failing to come to term.
Susan Sontag
#24. For better or for worse, I've watched people die in front of me. I see how they are in the end. And they're not cynical. In the end, they wanna hold somebody's hand. And that's real to me.
Mitch Albom
#25. Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.
Erica Jong
#26. Motivating people, forcing them to your will, gives you a cynical attitude toward humanity. It degrades everything it touches.
Frank Herbert
#27. In war it is necessary to kill as many people as possible
such is the cynical logic of war. Brutality in a fight is unavoidable; have you seen how cruelly children fight in the streets?
Maxim Gorky
#28. I'm cynical by nature, but I am also very hopeful because I see people from the Left and the Right showing up to these tea parties. You have people, bikers, union members and guys in three-piece suits showing up to these things.
Joe Wurzelbacher
#29. People have different ideas, emotional ideas, of what certain words mean, and they think of irony as something that's more associated with being cynical-it's kind of a put-down.
Jeff Koons
#30. The profoundly cynical premise of all religionists is that people are not capable of behaving decently toward one another unless they are lured with promises of pie in the sky and simultaneously terrorized by the threats of extreme nastiness in the eternal afterlife in hell.
Barbara G. Walker
#31. When people call me Sir Anthony I just think oh, that's a bit odd. But I'm not cynical about it. Um, I just feel more comfortable being called Tony or Mr. Hopkins, whatever name I'm called.
Anthony Hopkins
#32. I think you can be cynical about religion on occasion, and certainly skeptical about the degree to which some people use religion to manipulate other people.
Peter Jennings
#33. For sure, the funeral industry seems intensely cynical to me and I don't think it is HELPING people mourn.
Meghan O'Rourke
#34. The coming years will prove increasingly cynical and cruel. People will definitely not slip into oblivion while hugging each other. The final stages in the life of humanity will be marked by the monstrous war of all against all: the amount of suffering will be maximal.
Pentti Linkola
#35. Some people say that true love is a myth, that soulmates don't exist. I feel sadness for those cynical souls. They'll never know the high that comes from being with the one you're meant to be with. They'll never experience the absolute rightness of finding their true mate.
E.K. Blair
#36. It is not just power, but impotence, that corrupts people. It gives them the mind and soul of slaves. It makes them indifferent, lazy, cynical, irresponsible, and, above all, stupid.
John Holt
#37. I am cynical about politicians. My experience of politicians has been thoroughly negative. I have found that politicians are people that can not be taken at face value. There are very few politicians I have been impressed with.
Zac Goldsmith
#38. Most of the writers in TV are from L.A. or New York, and those are places where people are cynical and snarky. And they fly from L.A. to New York in an airplane over this vast, expansive land where people aren't snarky; they're a lot more like the 'Parks and Rec' characters.
Chris Pratt
#39. It's nice to be able to do things for other people, isn't it?
That's why it's fun to talk in the third person sometimes.
Patrick Bryant
#40. Cynicism stems from disappointment. Cynical and faithless people were not always like that. They were filled with possibilities and hope as kids. But they tried and perhaps failed.
Robin S. Sharma
#41. A lot of people think I'm cynical when I talk about acting. The truth of the matter is, I just don't want someone to get some lame advice that will send them in the wrong direction.
Amber Tamblyn
#42. Be sure that you first preach by the way you live. If you do not, people will notice that you say one thing, but live otherwise, and your words will bring only cynical laughter and a derisive shake of the head.
Carlo Borromeo
#43. One is sad when one thinks about life - cynical when one -sees what people make of it.
Erich Maria Remarque
#44. Reporters tend to find in others what they are suited to find, so there is a whole school of reporting where they are cynical about the world, and everything reinforces that. Whereas I tend to be optimistic and be amused by people and like them, even rather bad people.
Ira Glass
#45. You get kinder when you get into my age range. You think back to how really unkind you were, and how cynical you were and how you tossed things away and you tossed people away, and you didn't care because you were climbing some mountain that you thought you needed to be on top of.
Frank Langella
#46. It will never be possible for any length of time for any group of the American people, either by reason of wealth or learning or inheritance or economic power, to retain any mandate, any permanent authority to arrogate to itself the political control of American public life.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#47. People can be quite cynical. 'The Kills are too cool.' There's been an on-and-off relationship with the music press that loves us and then hates us then loves us again. I don't think any kind of press is reliable.
Alison Mosshart
#48. Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.
H.L. Mencken
#49. When people get cynical about love, they should look at us [Yoko and John Lennon] and see it is possible
Yoko Ono
#50. Young people are cynical about love. Ultimately, cynicism is the great mask of the disappointed and betrayed heart.
Bell Hooks
#51. And it's easy to be cynical about death when you're young. When you are young, death is an anomaly. It's not real. It only affects other people.
Neil Gaiman
#53. People are getting cynical about the news. It doesn't seem like there's one place to watch where you get the straight dope. You watch the channel that proves your point.
Jason Sudeikis
#54. The attitude among the people I knew was, 'Fleur wants to be a singer' but it was never, 'Go for it. You can do it.' Everyone was cynical because we'd never seen anyone where we came from do it.
Fleur East
#55. I can see her intelligence in every question she asks me and every observation she makes. But st the same time, there's an innocence that makes her completely different from most of the people I've met. She's not cynical or jaded. The streets haven't broken her. They've mad her stronger instead.
Marie Lu
#56. Avoid cynical and negative people like the plague. They are killers of potential.
Rick Pitino
#57. We had a lot of riots. We came under attack from many of the police departments. It certainly wasn't some publicity thing. I was afraid for many years. We couldn't play in LA for many years. A lot of people got very cynical.
Greg Ginn
#58. When young people are cynical, and snarky, they shoot down their own future. When you keep saying "No," all that's left is what other people said "Yes" to before you were born. Really, "No" is no choice at all.
Caitlin Moran
#59. I may be too cynical to believe in love at first sight, Montgomery, but I believe in the click that happens between two people.
K. Bromberg
#60. A lot of people have asked me whether I am a cynic or take a cynical view of politics and are often surprised when I say that I consider myself an optimist, but an optimist dressed in the robes of a realist.
Beau Willimon
#61. Being unhappy alone isn't all that much fun, but what's even tougher is playing one's part without forgetting one's lines, coping with other people's compassion, their comments, being there with the right line when they give the cue.
Francois Maspero
#62. Cynical? Thats my fascination. I do hateful things, for which people love me, And lovable things for which they hate me. I am a friend of enemies, the enemy of friends; I am admired for my detestability. I am both Poles and the Equator, with no Temperate Zones between.
Jerome Lawrence
#63. I am a lazy, cynical, middle-aged guy who has long since come to the conclusion that most historical periods really sucked, for most people, most of the time.
Charles Stross
#64. I am one of those people that's never been really cynical about life, you know.
K'naan
#65. Wonder is very necessary in life. When we're little kids, we're filled with wonder for the world - it's fascinating and miraculous. A lot of people lose that. They become cynical and jaded, especially in modern day society. Magic renews that wonder.
Doug Henning
#66. Why do people who so obviously hate children have so many of them? Audrey asked...Because they hate everyone else more. Their bratty kids are their revenge on a society that has denied them the riches they so rightly deserve.
Shaun David Hutchinson
#67. The people people have for friends
Your common sense appall
But the people people marry
Are the queerest folk of all.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#68. I may have spent long enough in your orbit to have absorbed your ferocious conviction that a happy family cannot be a mere myth or that even if it is, better to die trying for the fine if unattainable than sulking in passive, cynical resignation that hell is other people you're related to.
Lionel Shriver
#69. I will never be cynical again about people.
Dick Ebersol
#70. Walt had a marvelous intuition. And because he understood people very well, liked them and had great respect for people, there was nothing cynical about Walt.
John Hench
#71. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will in time produce a people as base as itself.
Joseph Pulitzer
#72. People were more interested in the phenomena than the art itself. This, combined with the growing interest in collecting art as an investment and the resultant boom in the art market, made it a difficult time for a young artist to remain sincere without becoming cynical.
Keith Haring
#73. I would rather have people be even cynical about me than to feed the negative vibe. Y
Michael Buble
#74. It's so easy to manipulate an audience, but it's nearly always clear that you are being manipulated. I think even people that are not critically attuned are aware of cynical manipulation in film.
John Boorman
#75. People grow bitter and cynical about life because they can't bend it to their will.
Marty Rubin
#76. Many people leave government disillusioned about its ability to achieve change and cynical about politicians. I left with rather opposite lessons.
Geoff Mulgan
#77. The only activity a cynic will find contagious is yawning, that is, with other people, at other people.
Criss Jami
#78. Call my cynical...but I've come to believe that most people who follow a total wack job aren't always true believers. They just like to follow. They like the perks. Makes them feel strong. Kind of weakens your faith in fruitcake fanatics.
Jonathan Maberry
#79. Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack.
George S. Patton
#80. Men of integrity, by their very existence, rekindle the belief that as a people we can live above the level of moral squalor. We need that belief; a cynical community is a corrupt community.
John W. Gardner
#81. But I'm trying not to be cynical - I don't want to be one of those people who has a cool opportunity and blows it. It's really amazing what's happening to me.
Shannyn Sossamon
#82. Thoroughly worldly people never understand even the world; they rely altogether on a few cynical maxims which are not true.
G.K. Chesterton
#83. The people of Africa have learned the lessons of patience and endurance in their long struggle for freedom.
In a cynical world we have become an inspiration to many. We signal that good can be achieved amongst human beings who are prepared to trust, prepared to belief in the goodness of people.
Nelson Mandela
#84. I don't see myself as a stand-up comic doing cynical, mean-spirited or disrespectful stuff. I'm very aware that I don't like to disrespect people too much.
Tracey Ullman
#85. In the highest sense, we are all creatures of light. And I have a very difficult time talking with people who are cynical about the world. "The world is no damn good, and we're all animals," and that kind of thing. Well, I'm an animal.
Richard Bach
#86. The most essential mental quality for a free people, whose liberty is to be progressive, permanent and on a large scale, is much stupidity.
Walter Bagehot
#87. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting ... it was the start of a new Arab world.. The Berlin Wall has fallen.
Walid Jumblatt
#88. Powerful people doing bad things LIKE cynical, despairing citizens.
Alex Steffen
#89. I think Kennedy being assassinated changed the world. That shot changed everything about America, and made us cynical, made people discontent and angry.
Robert Osborne
#90. I understand maybe some people are more impressionable than my hard, cynical self, but maybe they need to figure out how to be less of that.
Jessa Crispin
#91. She discovered what others know only too well in a cynical way, that people prefer to believe in and worship a god who is remote rather than live out the godlike nature which is their inherent being.
Henry Miller
#92. It's so important for you to get around people who will stir up those seeds of greatness. Don't surround yourself with naysayers. Life is too short to hang around negative, critical, cynical, skeptical, judgmental, small-minded, jealous people ... Did I leave out anything?
Joel Osteen
#93. Our art is cynical and bad-ass and made by people who will not be happy until you join them in the church of "everything is fucked up, so throw up your hands." This is art as anesthesia.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#94. No matter how hard I try, there's a cynical corner of my mind where everything is an act. People are game pieces. Information is currency.
Brandon Mull
#95. It has been my experience that people who are at cross-purposes with nature are cynical about mankind and ill at ease with themselves.
Indira Gandhi
#96. I think people today are very cynical. They need to bring other people down. Reality television and tabloid magazines-never before did we need to see movie stars taking out their garbage. But all of a sudden, it's front-page news-trying to figure out who's dating whom, all that stuff. Who cares?
Scarlett Johansson
