#cynic

Will any of those men under you ever really understand all this? They're professional cynics, and it's too late for them. Why do you want to go back with them? So you can keep up with the Joneses? To buy a gyro just like the Smith has? To listen to music with your pocketbook instead of your glands? ↗

— Ray Bradbury

#feeling #music #understanding #men

All men have a natural fear of making a mistake--by believing too well of a person. However, the error of believing too ill of a person is perhaps not feared, at least not in the same degree as the other. ↗

— Søren Kierkegaard

#men

All I ask is one thing, and I’m asking this particularly of young people: please don’t be cynical. I hate cynicism, for the record, it’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen. ↗

— Conan O'Brien

#happiness #inspirational #inspirational

... motivating people, forcing them to your will, gives you a cynical attitude toward humanity. It degrades everything it touches. ↗

— Frank Herbert

#motivation #attitude

As a result, I've been portrayed as a cynical barbarian preying on the very clients I was charged to defend. ↗

— Jack Abramoff

#been #charged #clients #cynical #defend

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

#attuned #audience #aware #being #clear

Generally I don't like doing remakes, but I think that's more in the cynical world of Hollywood where normally remakes are purely for commercial reasons. ↗

— Gerard Butler

#cynical #doing #generally #hollywood #i

We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs. ↗

— Kenneth Clark

#cynicism #destroy #disillusion #effectively #just

When I was in the second grade, I used to think love was the feeling a man gets while riding a motorcycle and having a woman embrace him tightly from behind. Maybe I’m cynical now, but I’m starting to think love is a unicycle with a flat tire. ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#funny #humor #love #age

Fukuyama’s thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious. It should be remembered, though, that even when Fukuyama advanced it, the idea that history had reached a ‘terminal beach’ was not merely triumphalist. Fukuyama warned that his radiant city would be haunted, but he thought its specters would be Nietzschean rather than Marxian. Some of Nietzsche’s most prescient pages are those in which he describes the ‘oversaturation of an age with history’. ‘It leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself’, he wrote in Untimely Meditations, ‘and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism’, in which ‘cosmopolitan fingering’, a detached spectatorialism, replaces engagement and involvement. This is the condition of Nietzsche’s Last Man, who has seen everything, but is decadently enfeebled precisely by this excess of (self) awareness. ↗

— Mark Fisher

#end-of-history #fukuyama #history #irony #last-man