#cynicism

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

Jake was close to tears. In that moment he saw the world in its true light, as a place where nothing had ever been any good and nothing of significance done: no art worth a second look, no philosophy of the slightest appositeness, no law but served the state, no history that gave an inkling of how it had been and what had happened. And no love, only egotism, infatuation and lust. ↗

— Kingsley Amis

#history #love #pessimism #truth #art

...[we] has left nothing durable to signalize his stay upon this planet. [we]eventually dies to the honest regret of [our] associates. ↗

— James Branch Cabell

#death #dying #death

Show me somebody who is always smiling, always cheerful, always optimistic, and I will show you somebody who hasn't the faintest idea what the heck is really going on. ↗

— Mike Royko

#humor #humor

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

#good-and-evil #idealism #politics #vetinari #life

The real inferiority of women to men is shown by their hate of paederasty, which they regard as unfair competition. Men on the other hand rather approve of Sapphism, as saving them trouble & expense. —Aleister Crowley. 1929-03-09 diary entry. ↗

— Lawrence Sutin

#cynicism #sex #life

There was something in her eyes that made me trust her. Maybe it was because they held the same cynicism, the same world-weariness I saw in my own every morning when I looked at myself in the mirror. ↗

— Melika Dannese Lux

#kindred-spirits #olga-belododia #partners #realization #recognition

My comedy does not come from a place of deep cynicism, and I tend to play characters who are naive in some way. ↗

— Anna Faris

#come #comedy #cynicism #deep #does

I think a lot of cynicism has dropped away from my shoulders since I stopped drinking. ↗

— Graham Coxon

#cynicism #drinking #dropped #i #i think

Personally, I've always found the study of life incredibly boring – I much prefer to just live it. I do enjoy speculating on life, though. But to go and ruin that speculation by checking it against facts, it's terribly disappointing. I'm afraid it would turn me into a cynic. ↗

— Bauvard

#cynicism #empiricism #funny #humor #life