“The devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people meaner.”

“The devil himself is not inspired. He's the master of imitation, I don't think he can succeed in inspiring anyone too.”

“The optimist will never say that he's unemployed. But he will claim that he has full freedom to do anything he wants. He can choose whether to make money or waste his VALUABLE time.”

“If the devil cannot make us bad, he will make us busy.”

“When the devil wants to destroy talented writers, he makes them journalists. Thus he makes sure he has killed their creativity.”

“I think about how people use the devil as an alias for the things they fear. The cause and effect is backward. The devil doesn't make anyone do anything. People just do things and blame the devil after.”

“When people make a contract with the devil and give him an air-conditioned office to work in, he doesn't go back home easily.”

“…If ever I murdered somebody," he added quite simply, "I dare say it might be an Optimist."
"Why?" cried Merton amused. "Do you think people dislike cheerfulness?”

“The Devil was sick,—the Devil a monk would be;
The Devil was well,—the devil a monk was he.”

“I think the satirist is always basically optimistic. The satirist's complaint about society is always that it doesn't measure up to a fairly high ideal he has. I think that even the bitterest satirist, even a man like Swift, was probably rather an optimist at heart.”