#cynicism

Everyone is so cynical about the possibility of democracy today. But not me, I’m an idealist: democracy isn’t possible outside my own mind. According to my perceptions, this is a dictatorship. ↗

— Benson Bruno

#democracy #funny #humor #idealism #politics

Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse ↗

— Joseph Brodsky

#human #life #philosophy #wisdom #life

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

Obviously, there’s no way of making money that doesn’t hurt somebody somewhere, but there are degrees of scale and immediacy. A merchant prince or a banker or a wealthy landowner isn’t generally required to take responsibility for the people he cheats, screws and starves; society couldn’t function if that were the case. ↗

— K.J. Parker

#economy #money #money

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

I read some of my stories recently and thought, 'How in the hell did I get away with that?' I had some really raw cynicism in some of them. ↗

— Carl Barks

#cynicism #did #get #had #hell

Lying is an indispensable part of making life tolerable. ↗

— Bergen Evans

#humor #humor

Maybe it's the fact the most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip - and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It's more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendant horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we've hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it's stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naivete. ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#cynicism #youth #age

You know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you're cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism. ↗

— W. Somerset Maugham

#critics #cynical #cynicism #does #get