Top 100 Quotes About Cynicism
#1. Are there people to aspire to? Can people be strong enough to withstand all of this disillusionment? Maybe the time is right for people to emerge from the easy cynicism and try to get back to a place where we can actually believe in people and trust people to have proper motivations.
Brendan Gleeson
#3. There's something I believe wholeheartedly: Cynicism is the true refuge of the pseudo-intellectual, .. Cynicism is easy. Joy is an extremely advanced spiritual and intellectual tenet.
Craig Ferguson
#4. Evil is boring. Cynicism is pointless. Fear is a bad habit. Despair is lazy. Hopelessness is self-indulgent. On the other hand: Joy is fascinating. Love is an act of heroic genius. Pleasure is our birthright. Chronic ecstasy is a learnable skill.
Rob Brezsny
#5. I have named the destroyers of nations: comfort, plenty, and security - out of which grow a bored and slothful cynicism, in which rebellion against the world as it is, and myself as I am, are submerged in listless self-satisfaction.
John Steinbeck
#6. Obsessing on evil is boring. Rousing fear is a hackneyed shtick. Wallowing is despair is a bad habit. Indulging in cynicism is akin to committing a copycat crime.
Rob Brezsny
#7. My cynicism continuously undermines her faith in her own ability to master her moods.
Jerzy Kosinski
#8. I don't "lol". I tried it once but it just didn't agree with me.
R.D. Ronald
#9. Big business increasingly likes to portray itself as socially concerned, adopting the style of civic action through 'campaigns' of varying degrees of cynicism.
Geoff Mulgan
#10. You know perfectly well that if ever you really want to, you can come back to me, he said without the slightest trace of irony and cynicism, and left.
Ama Ata Aidoo
#11. Among a coward's weapons, cynicism is the nastiest of all
Tracy Kidder
#12. A cynic should never marry an idealist. For the cynic, marriage represents the welcome end of romantic life, with all its agony and ecstasy. But for the idealist, it is only the beginning.
Julie Burchill
#13. Lying is an indispensable part of making life tolerable.
Bergen Evans
#15. Maybe a new religion will rise now. Maybe without it, man will crumble in cynicism and selfishness because he really needs his gods.
Anne Rice
#16. It is a well-known fact that very often, putting the period of boyhood out of the argument, the older we grow the more cynical and hardened we become; indeed, many of us are only saved by timely death from moral petrification, if not from moral corruption.
H. Rider Haggard
#17. I will eliminate hatred, envy, jealousy, selfishness, and cynicism, by developing love for all humanity, because I know that a negative attitude toward others can never bring me success. I will cause others to believe in me, because I will believe in them, and in myself.
Napoleon Hill
#18. Out of the unconscious lips of babes and sucklings are we satirized.
Mark Twain
#19. Why does any kind of cynicism appeal to people? Because it seems like a mark of maturity, of sophistication, like you've seen everything and know better. Or because putting something down feels like pushing yourself up.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#20. The real work was the identification of those aspects of yourself that led to what he called "the negative emotions" - anger, envy, bitterness, greed, cynicism, hatred and the like - things that poured hurt into an already overfull world.
Roland Merullo
#21. Cynicism is the intellectual cripple's substitute for intelligence.
Russell Lynes
#22. Haven't you heard of privacy, or were you raised by a tribe of hedonistic Vikings?
Wade Kelly
#23. Take action. You can either be a passive victim of circumstance or you can be the active hero of your own life. Action is the antidote to apathy and cynicism and despair. You will inevitably make mistakes but at the end of your days, you will be remembered for your gallop, not for your stumble.
Bradley Whitford
#24. I exaggerate. I oversimplify. I generalize. But there's no cynicism here. American poetry is a mess. Long live American poetry.
David Biespiel
#25. Our triumphant age of plenty is riddled with darker feelings of doubt, cynicism, distrust, boredom and a strange kind of emptiness
Samuel Johnson
#26. Enter faith, and a whole new factor enters the equation. Words like "impossible" seem out of place. Despair and cynicism feel like insults to God. Hope grows, and love, and therefore motivation to care, to give, to act, to try, to dream, to risk.
Brian D. McLaren
#27. Its [Dreams from My Father] also a reflection about how we might start a better conversation in our democracy about how to solve problems, because it feels as if our political system - it just seems there is so much cynicism and negativity in our politics.
Barack Obama
#28. Cynicism leads to despair, while fixating on the efforts that seemed to work in the past makes an idol out of spiritual states.
Monks Of New Skete
#29. Pessimism, cynicism and fear will only lead to a very small life. Don't live small.
Neil Abramson
#30. 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
#31. Genius moves to creation, not to destruction. Only a very few have combined both.
Edith Hamilton
#32. Both faith and cynicism make judgment too easy.
Mason Cooley
#33. Well, the good news is that there's quite a lot of cynicism about major labels within radio and the press. I think they have been largely disillusioned by the manner in which the record companies have developed music.
Mick Hucknall
#34. There's such a cynicism about the phrase 'I laughed all the way to the bank.' It's as though money is what you're doing, rather than playing music. If you're playing a money game, why not get into banking?
Artie Shaw
#35. How tolerable misfortunes appear when they affect only other people! How strong the human body seems when it's another man's flesh that bleeds! How easy it is to look death in the face when it's another man's turn!
Irene Nemirovsky
#36. They were fast-moving opportunists encased in cynicism and proud of it.
Jay Carr
#37. Did you have friend?"
"I've read about them, but I don't believe they exist."
"Your cynicism is amazing.
Jodi Meadows
#38. Cynicism does not cause inaction..
David Wong
#40. To the Latin, cynicism and middle age are synonymous. Look at our politicians - they move through their careers from left to center to right, like the hands of a clock.
Helen McCloy
#41. Americans are a very backward people, with all the real virtues of a backward people; the patriarchal simplicity and human dignity of a democracy, and a respect for labor uncorrupted by cynicism.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#42. As my father always used to tell me, 'You see, son, there's always someone in the world worse off than you.' And I always used to think, 'So?
Bill Bryson
#43. Energy always flows either toward hope, community, love, generosity, mutual recognition, and spiritual aliveness or it flows toward despair, cynicism, fear that there is not enough, paranoia about the intentions of others, and a desire to control.
Michael Lerner
#44. (Vice President) Garner has taken his personal smallness, his lack of generosity, and forged it into a political principle. He has no imagination, no convictions, and he substitutes political cynicism for social understanding.
Hamilton Basso
#45. 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.
Bertrand Russell
#46. It's weird, marriage. It's like this license that gives a person the legal right to control their spouse / their 'other half.
Jess C. Scott
#47. Life is not an easy matter ... . You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.
Leon Trotsky
#48. Tackle the difficult things first in the morning; make changes in the way you network. Treat everyone with respect and dignity. This stops you from cynicism and negativity. End your day with that same attitude you started. Renew your contract with a day well completed.
Rick Pitino
#49. It's a good time to be making movies, despite the cynicism people have about Hollywood.
Rob Morrow
#50. Numbness and cynicism, I suspect, are more often the products of frustrated compassion than of evil intentions.
David Hilfiker
#51. Baseball, of all sports, and maybe of all human endeavors, has no room for cynicism.
Howard Frank Mosher
#52. 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
#53. Cynicism is extremely contagious, and the most pious among us cannot long endure its potency. The gullible should be on their guard, however, since this endearing quality frequently masquerades as wit.
Mike Corbett
#54. Californians don't have that marvelous British cynicism, but then the British can be so patronizing at times.
Alex Kingston
#55. Maybe your empathy's just a comforting lie, you ever think of that? Maybe you think you know how the other person feels but you're only feeling yourself, maybe you're even worst than me. Or maybe we're all just guessing.
Peter Watts
#56. Trust in God allows us to live with active expectation, not cynicism.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#57. It's all about the triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism.
Craig Ferguson
#58. The major motivation theories by which most men live can lead them only to depression and cynicism.
Abraham Maslow
#59. Civility is not a tactic or a sentiment. It is the determined choice of trust over cynicism, of community over chaos.
George W. Bush
#61. If it's a choice between a difficult truth and a simple lie, people will take the lie every time. Even if it kills them.
Paul Murray
#62. An old body when it is loved becomes a sacred treasure; and sex itself must always, it seems to me, come to us as a sacrament and be so used or it is meaningless. The flesh is suffused by the spirit, and it is forgetting this in the act of love-making that creates cynicism and despair.
May Sarton
#63. Cynicism is our shared common language, the Esperanto that actually caught on, and though I'm not fluent in it - I like too many things, and I'm not envious of enough people - I know enough to get by.
Nick Hornby
#64. The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.
John Updike
#65. It was lovely to see cynicism in one so young. It positively restored his faith in human nature.
Lauren Willig
#66. That's one of the great gifts of this, the greatest of all games, baseball: it allows you, still, to lose yourself in a dream, to feel and remember a season of life when summer never seemed to die and the assault of cynicism hadn't begun to batter optimism.
Mike Barnicle
#67. A cynic sees little to admire in the world, while the world sees even less to admire in him.
Evan Esar
#68. Cynicism is something that is part of the media production of a certain type of subjectivity or consciousness that is passive and disempowered, cynical, fatalistic, pessimistic.
Daniel Pinchbeck
#69. I think that all the anger and cynicism comes from suppressing things that we always wanted.
John Lee Hancock
#70. Cynicism is the easiest of all reactions, right? But it's also so disappointing and self-defeating.
Chris Hadfield
#71. HYPOTHESES: Evil is boring. Cynicism is idiotic. Fear is a bad habit. Despair is lazy. Joy is fascinating. Love is an act of heroic genius. Pleasure is our birthright. Receptivity is a superpower.
Rob Brezsny
#72. I find it actually the height of romance to legally bind yourself to someone because you're really taking care of someone, and letting them take care of you. I actually have no cynicism about that.
Jen Kirkman
#73. Cynicism isn't smarter, it's only safer. There's nothing fluffy about optimism.
Jewel
#74. I dreamed about the future because that's what people persuade you to do when you're a kid, but that's the biggest lie of all
that you can plan. Reality is, you have no fucking clue what's coming and neither do they.
Tammara Webber
#75. Your every ill-thought, secreted hate, cynical and vicious judgment you carry is meant only for you.
Bryant McGill
#76. There is an institutional cynicism that causes reporters to question everything the President says, and the motives of everything the President and his Administration try to accomplish.
Dee Dee Myers
#77. Cynicism formulates issues clearly, but only to dismiss them.
Mason Cooley
#78. The temptation shared by all forms of intelligence: cynicism.
Albert Camus
#80. Life is a very terrible thing, mostly, with points of wonder and beauty. Most of what makes it terrible, though, is simply that there's so much of it, blaring in through the five senses.
Samuel R. Delany
#81. When those who have passed through their troubles and come out the other side suddenly with their new beliefs wholeheartedly, it is viewed with cynicism by others. Why? Because when you're in trouble you look harder for answers than those who aren't, and it's those answers that help you through.
Cecelia Ahern
#82. Anonymity is an abused privilege, abused most by people who mistake vitriol for wisdom and cynicism for wit.
Danny Wallace
#83. I always feel the cynicism is reality with maybe an alternate spelling or something because I feel that I have real perspective on this particular issue of punishment in society.
Woody Allen
#84. I have a healthy cynicism, but not anger.
Sheryl Crow
#85. Humans are moving into a new phase, one based on the knowledge that talking about their feelings has never got them anywhere.
Glen Duncan
#87. It's not easy to be optimistic and hopeful after you come to know and love some of the young victims of sexual abuse, violence, poverty, neglect, drugs, and rape. It's taking me a while to climb out of this hatred, this noxious cynicism. I'm doing my best.
M.T. Johnson
#88. Optimisn is a choice. Cynicism isnt smarter - it's just safer.
Jewel
#89. That so much of our experience, or the stereotype which passes for it should be dealt with by means of the short story is perhaps a symptom not unnoticeable elsewhere in the public domain of an unlovely cynicism about human character.
Howard Nemerov
#90. But history does repeat itself; that is the comedy and the crime of history. Men learn nothing. Times change. Scenes change. Names change. But passions are the same.
Carlos Fuentes
#91. Cynicism is a form of cowardice, a failure of courage to hope.
Merle Shain
#92. It is our birthright to uncover the soul - to remove the layers of fear or shame or apathy or cynicism that conceal it.
Elizabeth Lesser
#93. Cynicism is proof of our intimacy issues with the Divine.
Elisa Romeo
#94. From the earliest beginnings of Lyndon Johnson's political life - from his days at college when he had captured control of campus politics - his tactics had consistently revealed a pragmatism and a cynicism that had no discernible limits.
Robert A. Caro
#95. His eyes. Unclouded by cynicism, questioning but with a certainty that there were answers, warmly innocent in some strange way. A child's eyes, she thought. Even more irresistible when set in a man's face.
Alexandra York
#96. I have to stop being young. I have to get jaded. I have to be cynical. I have to stop speaking. I have to be invisible. He likes things that don't really exist.
Sarahbeth Purcell
#97. People needed proof that Utopia was nothing more than a theory, an illusion read in fictional stories.
Soroosh Shahrivar
#99. A vision not consistent with values that people live by day by day will not only fail to inspire genuine enthusiasm, it will often foster outright cynicism. These
Peter M. Senge
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