From 1980s onwards, Only Integrity is Going to Count (1983)
Context: I find the audiences very excited. But then they come and say to me, "Your optimism has brushed off on me. I didn't know we had an option. I feel so much better." They say, "Your optimism." And I am not optimistic or pessimistic. I feel that optimism and pessimism are very unbalanced. I am a very hard engineer. I am a mechanic. I am a sailor. I am an air pilot. I don't tell people I can get you across the ocean with my ship unless I know what I'm talking about.
“I tend to be an optimist about human nature but a political pessimist…I think we’re living in very, very scary times and we have to find ways of looking squarely at it and finding reasons for optimism.”
Source: On balancing pessimism and optimism in “Kamila Shamsie: 'We have to find reasons for optimism’” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jun/08/kamila-shamsie-we-have-to-find-reasons-for-optimism-home-fire in The Guardian (2018 Jun 8)
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Kamila Shamsie 18
Pakistani writer 1973Related quotes
As quoted in Serving "60 Years to Life", Newsweek Europe (12 December 2005)
"The Best Time-Management Advice Is Depressing But Liberating" (2021 August 11)
“I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist.”
Quoted in "Why Oscar Niemeyer is king of curves" http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/architecture_and_design/article3035080.ece, Tom Dyckhoff, The Times Online (London, 2007-12-12).
As quoted in The Artist's Voice : Talks With Seventeen Modern Artists (1962) by Katharine Kuh, p. 119
1960s
Source: Broca's Brain (1979), Chapter 5, “Night Walkers and Mystery Mongers: Sense and Nonsense at the End of Science” (p. 69)
Often quoted as "Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.", e.g, Peter's Quotations : Ideas for Our Time (1979) by Laurence J. Peter, p. 112.
Faith for Living (1940)