#cynicism

...God created the world in six days. On the seventh day, he rested. On the eighth day, he started getting complaints. And it hasn't stopped since. ↗

— James Scott Bell

#cynicism #god #humor #humor

Indulge me, John. Cynicism and foul language are the only vices I'm presently capable of. Everything else takes energy or money. ↗

— Mary Doria Russell

#money

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

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

I think that all the anger and cynicism comes from suppressing things that we always wanted. ↗

— John Lee Hancock

#anger #comes #cynicism #i #i think

Cynicism is the intellectual cripple's substitute for intelligence. ↗

— Russell Lynes

#cynicism #intellectual #intelligence #substitute

The cure for cynicism is simply to engage honestly. ↗

— Jeremy Paxman

#cynicism #engage #honestly #simply

A thousand years from now nobody is going to know that you or I ever lived. The cynic is right, but lazy. He says ‘You live, you die and nothing you do will ever make a difference.’ But as long as I live, I’m going to be like Beethoven and shake my fist at fate and try to do something for those who live here now and who knows how far into the future that will go. If I accomplish nothing more than making my arm sore, at least I will be satisfied that I have lived. ↗

— Jackson Burnett

#cynicism #determination #fate #future #life-and-living

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

Gold was not sure of many things, but he was definite about one: for every successful person he knew, he could name at least two others of greater ability, better, and higher intelligence who, by comparison, had failed. ↗

— Joseph Heller

#intelligence