#cynicism

We are all cynics now, I suppose, and even a mewling infant knows that to save a life is to make an eternal enemy. ↗

— Paul Hoffman

#baby #childe #cynic #cynicism #enemy

Irony differentiates. Cynicism never does. ↗

— Paul Horgan

#differentiates #does #irony #never

The worst cynicism: a belief in luck. ↗

— Joyce Carol Oates

#cynicism #luck #worst

In the end, that's what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or a politics of hope? ↗

— Barack Obama

#about #cynicism #election #end #in the end

You're such a cynic," Molly said. "I think cynics are playful and cute. ↗

— Jim Butcher

#harry-dresden #humor #molly-carpenter #change

Every ounce of my cynicism is supported by historical precedent. ↗

— Glen Cook

#humor #life #humor

It all depends on what people you're talking about helping. That's the wonderful think about just about every religion on the planet - they're all so incredibly selfish. ↗

— Derek Landy

#cynicism #helping-others #perspective #religion #selfishness

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

#life #misery #weakness #life

Remember, you cannot be both young and wise. Young people who pretend to be wise to the ways of the world are mostly just cynics. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us. Cynics always say no. But saying “yes” begins things. Saying “yes” is how things grow. Saying “yes” leads to knowledge. “Yes” is for young people. So for as long as you have the strength to, say “yes'. ↗

— Stephen Colbert

#optimism #wisdom #youth #strength

Uncouth, clannish, lumbering about the confines of Space and Time with a puzzled expression on his face and a handful of things scavenged on the way from gutters, interglacial littorals, sacked settlements and broken relationships, the Earth-human has no use for thinking except in the service of acquisition. He stands at every gate with one hand held out and the other behind his back, inventing reasons why he should be let in. From the first bunch of bananas, his every sluggish fit or dull fleabite of mental activity has prompted more, more; and his time has been spent for thousands of years in the construction and sophistication of systems of ideas that will enable him to excuse, rationalize, and moralize the grasping hand. His dreams, those priceless comic visions he has of himself as a being with concerns beyond the material, are no more than furtive cannibals stumbling round in an uncomfortable murk of emotion, trying to eat each other. Politics, religion, ideology — desperate, edgy attempts to shift the onus of responsibility for his own actions: abdications. His hands have the largest neural representation in the somesthetic cortex, his head the smallest; but he's always trying to hide the one behind the other. ↗

— M. John Harrison

#greed #human-nature #thought #dreams