Cynicism Idealism Quotes

#1. Cynics are - beneath it all - only idealists with awkwardly high standards.

Alain De Botton

#2. Happiness too is inevitable.

Albert Camus

#3. Idealists and reformers all become executioners in their turn. The road to utopia ends with the steps of the scaffold, the endless moment of the guillotine.

Grant Morrison

#4. Learning how to be a good reader is what makes you a writer.

Zadie Smith

#5. If anything, we should feel sorry for the people who want us to feel bad about ourselves, because they are the ones struggling for approval. In middle school, bullies tortured other kids because they thought it would make people like them more.

Ariana Grande

#6. It is cynicism, and not idealism, that is generally the mark of youthful immaturity, or rather it is the cynic who is generally the most foolish romantic.

Andrew Sarris

#7. America is a country in which I see the most persistant idealism and the blandest of cynicism and the race is on between its vitality and its decadence.

Alistair Cooke

#8. I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are good people and bad people. You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.

Terry Pratchett

#9. Cynicism has all the smart words on it's side; idealism uses a nursery school dictionary.

Michael Arditti

#10. The starry-eyed idealists of today have submerged their critical faculties beneath a tidal wave of slop marketed by those old hippies who now sell a user-friendly dilution of their original enlightenment.

Peter J. Carroll

#11. You always have to remember - no matter what you're told - that God loves all the flowers, even the wild ones that grow on the side of the highway.

Cyndi Lauper

#12. In centenarians and supercentenarians - people over 110 - you see a higher level of fecundity much later in life.

S. Jay Olshansky

#13. Scratch any cynic and you will find a disappointed idealist.

George Carlin

#14. Scratch the surface of most cynics and you find a frustrated idealist - someone who made the mistake of converting his ideals into expectations.

Peter M. Senge

#15. Dr. Atkins continued, "Sometimes silence is a way to cover emotion or to hide true feelings. Sometimes the bridge between emotion and language is so vast or so scary that it's just easier not to cross it.

Melanie Dawn

#16. Cronkite was always one step short of disillusionment.

Douglas Brinkley

#17. A solid idea is a firm foundation of a universe construction.

Toba Beta

#18. Astrology has no more useful function than this, to discover the inmost nature of a man and to bring it out into his consciousness, that he may fulfil it according to the law of light.

Aleister Crowley

#19. Trying to impress her with the most interesting thing you can say will only make you look desperate and keep you awkwardly in your head

Nick Sparks

#20. We remain in the Romantic cycle initiated by Rousseau: liberal idealism canceled by violence, barbarism, disillusionment and cynicism.

Camille Paglia

#21. I always get them to call me whatever I want. I'm always in control. Isn't much I like more than a beautiful woman tied to my bed while I make her come till she passes out. So what's my problem?

Karen Marie Moning

#22. We are reformers in the spring, but iin autumn we stand by the old. Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ron Suskind

#23. If I didn't know my body, I'd swear I just had a small orgasm ...

A.R. Von

#24. There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.

William James

#25. Everything is cyclical. Historical eras go through times of intense cynicism, broken by periods of intense idealism.

Lauren Groff

#26. I can't bear the thought that a man of lofty mind and heart begins with the ideal of the Madonna and ends with the ideal of Sodom.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#27. Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths?

Edith Wharton

#28. We must rekindle the fire of idealism in our society, for nothing suffocates the promise of America more than unbounded cynicism and indifference.

Joe Biden

#29. Everything important I learned, I learned as a dishwasher.

Anthony Bourdain

#30. The holiday specifies that everyone recline during the meal. It is a symbolic gesture showing that Jews can eat with leisure because they have been freed from bondage.

Karl Katz

#31. Gie me ae spark o' Nature's fire,
That's a' the learning I desire.

Robert Burns

#32. Cynicism is idealism turned inside out. It stems from an expectation unrealized and a promise perverted. That is so much of Washington today in a nutshell.

Mark Leibovich

#33. I'm not ready to let the youthful part of myself go yet. If maturity means becoming a cynic, if you have to kill the part of yourself that is naive and romantic and idealistic - the part of you that you treasure most - to claim maturity, is it not better to die young but with your humanity intact?

Kenneth Cain