“Scratch any cynic and you will find a disappointed idealist.”
Variant: Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
George Carlin 270
American stand-up comedian 1937–2008Related quotes
Source: This Side of Paradise
“Cynics are merely idealists with unusually high standards.”
Variant: Cynics are - beneath it all - only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
Source: The Course of Love
“It had been his experience that the worst cynics all started out as idealists.”
Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Odyssey (2006), Chapter 18 (p. 166)
Source: All About Love: New Visions
“If you scratch a Conservative, you find a Fascist.”
Speech to the London Young Liberal Federation in the National Liberal Club (5 January 1925), quoted in John Campbell, Lloyd George: The Goat in the Wilderness, 1922–1931 (1977), p. 109
Leader of the Liberal Party in the House of Commons
“Scratch me and you will find the Nonconformist.”
1927. Quoted in Sir Charles Petrie, The Life and Letters of Sir Austen Chamberlain: Vol. II (Cassell, 1940), p. 321.
1920s
“Scratch the Christian and you find the pagan — spoiled.”
Children of the Ghetto (1892), bk. 2, ch. 6.
“Scratch a pessimist and you find often a defender of privilege.”
As quoted in "Sayings of the Week" in The Observer [London] (17 December 1943)