Cynicism Quotes - page 4

Doris: You have no values. With you it's all nihilism, cynicism, sarcasm, and orgasm.Harry: Hey, in France I could run for office with that slogan, and win! (Woody Allen)
When we only name the problem, when we state complaint without a constructive focus or resolution, we take hope away. In this way critique can become merely an expression of profound cynicism, which then works to sustain dominator culture. View quote
Bell hooks
Young people are cynical about love. Ultimately, cynicism is the great mask of the disappointed and betrayed heart. View quote
Bell hooks
You can't shut me up with your cynicism. I warn you- you must realise in time that you are not a mighty despot before whom everyone trembles. I do not tremble before you, I will fight you if you force me to it. I have not forgotten how despicably you treated our old friend, Abel [Yenukidze]. Never did you have a finer friend than Abel and you will never have a truer one. Yet, you caused Abel more harm and hardship than anyone else would do to an enemy. I have not forgiven you that two years ago you turned Abel out of the Kremlin although you had told him, and the people, that he was to become President of the Trans-Caucasian Republics. View quote
Grigoriy Ordzhonikidze
I combine concrete cynicism with a sort of vague optimism. View quote
Mary McCarthy
There's none of this wisecracking and cynicism that you see in ... some of the other cartoons. He's supposed to be a role model for kids. He cares about other people. View quote
Art Clokey
For a revolution, in order to be a true revolution, must be a world revolution. To achieve that world revolution, you the children of the Yankees must lend a hand. You must vomit forth your cynicism in the streets of your cities. You must mount an unrelenting attack on everything the bastards that rule your country hold dear. You must refuse to serve in their armies, you must reject the heroin offered in their universities, you must become clogs in their productive machines. View quote
Abbie Hoffman
Your universities teach you to be eternal cynics, a cynicism that can be only drowned in alcohol and diet pills and psychoanalysts and golf. Forget your cynicism. There is not one who has more respect for life than a revolutionist. View quote
Abbie Hoffman
Young people are very cynical now, you know? Very cynical! They've been taught cynicism, they've been - they've been bred cynicism. So, I think it's important to give them hope and realism in the same package, you know? You can be realistic but there should be - there should be hope in it. Because hope's what we're about. If we don't have hope then we don't go on. View quote
Tom Petty
Now it seems that Roger has once more taken up with Miss Roswyn. I can't say that I approve, but he has not troubled to ask my advice.” She heaved a sigh. "But I am sure that the world will never go precisely to my liking.” "Does it for anyone?” asked Bernard Bickel with good-natured cynicism. "Probably not, and I must reconcile myself to the fact. View quote
Jack Vance
Gandhi had been right. There was only one way to behave, even if it seemed, in the short term, against one's self-interest. Surely it was in one's self-interest in the long term to exhibit generosity, humanity, kindness and a sense of justice to one's fellow men. It was cynicism of Beesley's kind which had, after all, led to the threatened extinction of the whole human race. There could be no such thing s a "righteous” war, for war was by its very nature an act of injustice against the individual, but there could be such a thing as an "unrighteous” war-an evil war, a war begun by men who were utterly corrupt, both morally and intellectually. I had begun to think that it was a definition of those who would make war-that whatever motives they claimed, whatever ideals they promoted, whatever "threat” they referred to, they could not be excused-because of their actions they could only be of a degenerate and immoral character. (Michael Moorcock)
Most of the employees were the hard-boiled, Americanized, go-getting type to whom nothing in the world is sacred, except money. They had their cynical code worked out. The public are swine; advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket. And yet beneath their cynicism there was the final naivete, the blind worship of the money-god. View quote
George Orwell
Where there had been hope, there was now hopelessness. Where there had been courage, there was now cynicism. Where there had been life, there was a living death. During Nixon's reign, much of life was transformed into a nightmare. View quote
Pierre Stephen Robert Payne
I think there ought to be a club in which preachers and journalists could come together and have the sentimentalism of the one matched with the cynicism of the other. That ought to bring them pretty close to the truth. View quote
Reinhold Niebuhr
We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs. View quote
Kenneth Clark
It is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs. View quote
Kenneth Clark
In this age of cynicism, bipartisanship and personal cowardice, it's refreshing to find a group of people willing to die for what they believe. View quote
Patton Oswalt
Cynicism is not realistic and tough. It's unrealistic and kind of cowardly because it means you don't have to try. View quote
Peggy Noonan
Parents always live a less pure life than their children, because they condone everything they do. The ability to condone everything in oneself but practically nothing in one's children is the boon that "experience" bestows on humanity. What parents call experience is really nothing but attempts, successful to the point of sheer cynicism, to belie everything which they found pure, true and right when they were young. They themselves don't notice the awful cynicism behind this incessant talk of "experience" being the highest aim in life: they only notice "inexperience" in their children, that is, the form of inexperience called purity and integrity, and then they get annoyed. View quote
Stig Dagerman
Both religions and musicals work best with energetic and committed believers. Cynicism or detachment would have destroyed the magic - something true of religion, too. View quote
Lisa Randall
Perhaps my cynicism comes in good time. Better I have it early than too late. (Sheri S. Tepper)
Our enemy really isn't capitalism, it's cynicism. That's one the things I learned from Woody (Guthrie)... Not to be cynical... That cynicism... It destroys you, it rots you away from the inside. So that sense of optimism and humanity... which 20 years ago I would have called socialism but now I'll call compassion... You know, that idea is still out there and alive and if you can plug into that and encourage that it makes it all worth while. View quote
Billy Bragg
The chief wrong which false prophets do to their following is not financial... But the real harm is on the mental and spiritual plane. There are those who hunger and thirst after higher values which they feel wanting in their humdrum lives. They live in mental confusion or moral anarchy, and seek vaguely for truth and beauty and moral support. When they are deluded and then disillusioned, cynicism and confusion follow. The wrong of these things, as I see it, is not in the money the victims part with half so much as in the mental and spiritual poison they get. But that is precisely the thing the Constitution put beyond the reach of the prosecutor, for the price of freedom of religion or of speech or of the press is that we must put up with, and even pay for, a good deal of rubbish. View quote
Robert H. Jackson
Cynicism is full of naive disappointments. View quote
Mason Cooley
Hypocrisy is the outside of cynicism. View quote
Mason Cooley