This is actually James Branch Cabell from The Silver Stallion (1926)
Misattributed
“I'm not pessimistic. It is the world that is terrible. How can we be optimistic in the face of a planet where people live so badly, nature is being destroyed and the dominant empire is money?”
ÉPOCA Interview (in Portuguese) http://revistaepoca.globo.com/Epoca/0,6993,EPT1061569-1666-2,00.html, São Paulo, 2005.
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José Saramago 138
Portuguese writer and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in … 1922–2010Related quotes
Coth, in Book Four : Coth at Porutsa, Ch. XXVI : The Realist in Defeat
Source: The Silver Stallion (1926)
Context: Yet creeds mean very little... The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true. So I elect for neither label.
“I'm a pessimist about probabilities, I'm an optimist about possibilities.”
As quoted in "Lewis Mumford Remembers" by Carey Winfrey in The New York Times (6 July 1977)
As quoted in Serving "60 Years to Life", Newsweek Europe (12 December 2005)
“I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist.”
“To the optimist, pessimists are neurotic; to the pessimist, optimists are deluded.”
Humor in Psychotherapy (2007)
“Optimists and pessimists differ only on the date of the end of the world.”
p, 125
Unkempt Thoughts (1957)
“A pessimist is a man who has been compelled to live with an optimist.”
The Note Book of Elbert Hubbard (1927)
Variant: Both optimists and pessimists contribute to society. The optimist invents the aeroplane, the pessimist the parachute.