Quotes about cynic
page 2

“Sorry to be so cynical, but this is New York”

David Levithan (1972) American author and editor

Source: Dash & Lily's Book of Dares

“… all cynicism masks a failure to cope.”

John Fowles book The Magus

Source: The Magus

Failure

“Cynic, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic's eyes to improve his vision.”

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist

The Devil's Dictionary (1911)
Source: The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary

“You are a cynical man, Mr. Pleasant."
"We live in cynical times, Miss Cain.”

Derek Landy (1974) Irish children's writer

Source: Death Bringer

Time

“What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human […] is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

Fear

“Every ounce of my cynicism is supported by historical precedent.”

Glen Cook book Shadow Games

Source: Shadow Games

Support

“A cynic by experience, a romantic by inclination and now a hero by necessity.”

David Gemmell book Legend

Source: Legend

“Sink into morbid, cynical reflection on how much romantic heartbreak is to do with ego and miffed pride rather than actual loss”

Helen Fielding book Bridget Jones's Diary

Source: Bridget Jones's Diary

Loss

“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.”

Bell Hooks (1952) American author, feminist, and social activist

Source: Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope

Hope, Way, Problem

“The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Men, World, Dreams, Problem

“among a coward's weapons, cynicism is the nastiest of all”

Tracy Kidder (1945) writer

Source: Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World

“Scientists have discovered that the small brave act of cooperating with another person, of choosing trust over cynicism, generosity over selfishness, makes the brain light up with quiet joy.”

Natalie Angier (1958) American writer

Light, Joy, Personality, Selfishness

“America is the greatest, freest, and most decent society in existence. It is an oasis of goodness in a desert of cynicism and barbarism. This country, once an experiment unique in the world, is now the last best hope for the world.”

Dinesh D'Souza (1961) Indian-American political commentator, filmmaker, author

Source: Books, What's So Great About America (2003), Ch. 6: America the Beautiful

World, Hope, Country

“Some cynical Frenchman has said that there are two parties to a love-transaction: the one who loves and the other who condescends to be so treated.”

William Makepeace Thackeray Vanity Fair

Vol. I, ch. 13.
Source: Vanity Fair (1847–1848)

Love

“In the end we shall have had enough of cynicism, skepticism and humbug, and we shall want to live more musically.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Music

“Mystics are all a bit funny in the head anyway," the priest added cynically, "which is why the church locks them all up in mental hospitals and euphemistically calls these institutions monasteries.”

Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007) American author and polymath

Source: The Eye in the Pyramid

“Romantics might like to think of themselves as being composed of stardust. Cynics might prefer to think of themselves as nuclear waste.”

Simon Singh book Big Bang

Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe, Fourth Estate, ISBN 0-00-716220-0

Thinking

“Pasteboard pies and paper flowers are being banished from the stage by the growth of that power of accurate observation which is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it…”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

1890s
Source: The World (18 July 1894), Music in London 1890-1894 being criticisms contributed week by week to The World (New York: Vienna House, 1973)

Flowers

“It's not that the Irish are cynical. It's rather that they have a wonderful lack of respect for everything and everybody.”

Brendan Behan (1923–1964) Irish poet, short story writer, novelist, and playwright

Source: As quoted in Brendan Behan, Interviews and Recollections (1982), Vol. 2, edited by E. H. Mikhail, p. 186

“The wise man tests before he talks. The critic but follows the fad of a cynical and apathetic age.”

L. Ron Hubbard (1911–1986) American science fiction author, philosopher, cult leader, and the founder of the Church of Scientology

Age

“He might have been naive, but he didn't care; he said he's rather die with his heart on his sleeve than end up another cynic.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

Source: Let the Great World Spin

Heart

“Born in a generation that thinks cynical and disenchanted is cool,
sometimes I'm a little off the beaten track.”

Karen Marie Moning book Darkfever

Source: Darkfever

Thinking

“Subsequent hearings have presented to the public a vapid and hollow charade, in which repetition of platitudes has replaced discussion of viewpoints and personal anecdotes have supplanted legal analysis. Such hearings serve little educative function, except perhaps to reinforce lessons of cynicism that citizens often glean from government. Neither can such hearings contribute toward an evaluation of the Court and a determination whether the nominee would make it a better or worse institution. A process so empty may seem ever so tidy — muted, polite, and restrained — but all that good order comes at great cost.”

Elena Kagan (1960) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

On hearings of nominees to the Supreme Court after the rejection of Judge Bork, in a review of The Confirmation Mess (1995).

Education, Personality

“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 (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician

Deconstructing Harry (1997)

“With any luck. Stark smiled cynically. Not that he did not believe in luck. Rather, he had found it to be an uncertain ally.”

Leigh Brackett (1915–1978) American novelist and screenwriter

Source: The Ginger Star (1974), Chapter 3 (p. 18)

Smile

“I hated myself. I had created nothing, I belonged to nothingness, to the néant, and it seemed to me that my own death was the only thing that I could create; and still, even then, I thought it might accuse everyone who had ever known me. It would validate all my cynicism, it would prove all my solitary selfishness; it would stand, and be remembered, as a final dark victory.”

John Fowles book Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

Death, Hate, Victory, Selfishness

“There remains the problem of Goebbels' reputation. He wore the title of Big Liar (bestowed by Anglo-Saxon propaganda) and yet he never stopped battling for propaganda to be as accurate as possible. He preferred being cynical and brutal to being caught in a lie. He used to say: "Everybody must know what the situation is." He was always the first to announce disastrous events or difficult situations, without hiding anything. The result was a general belief between 1939 and 1942 that German communiqués not only were more concise, clearer and less cluttered, but were more truthful than Allied communiqués (American and neutral opinion) — and, furthermore, that the Germans published all the news two or three days before the Allies. All this is so true that pinning the title of Big Liar on Goebbels must be considered quite a propaganda success.”

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchist

"The Characteristics of Propaganda" in Readings in Propaganda and Persuasion : New and Classic Essays (2006) edited by Garth S. Jowett and Victoria O'Donnell, p. 48, note 47

Truth, Lie, Problem, Success

“I'm backing David Cameron's campaign out of pure, cynical self-interest.”

Boris Johnson (1964) British politician, historian and journalist

"Conference Diary", The Independent, 5 October 2005, p. 7.
On The 2005 Conservative Leadership Contest.
2000s, 2005

“Of late, attempts have been made in the USA — at a high level and in a rather cynical form — to play the "Chinese card" against the USSR. This is a shortsighted and dangerous policy.”

Leonid Brezhnev (1906–1982) General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

As quoted in Peace, Détente, and Soviet-American Relations : A Collection of Public Statements (1979), p. 222

“I think the major problem in growing up is to become sophisticated without becoming cynical.”

Robert A. Heinlein book I Will Fear No Evil

Source: I Will Fear No Evil (1970), Chapter 27, p. 473

Problem, Thinking

“What is really disturbing about The Name of the Rose, however, is the underlying belief in the liberating, anti-totalitarain force of laughter, of ironic distance. Our thesis here is almost the exact opposite of the underlying premise of Eco's novel: in contemporary socities, democratic or totalitarian, that cynical distance, laughter, irony, are so to speak, part of the game. The ruling ideology is not meant to be taken seriously or literally. Perhaps the greatest danger for totalitarianism is people who take ideology seriously.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

Source: The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), pp.27, "Totalitarian Laughter"

People, Game, Laughter, Parting

“How could you tell, when utter honesty and cynical manipulation would each account completely for the things she said and did?”

Orson Scott Card book Homebody

Homebody (1998)

“Many of the words and numbers bandied by Obama and his administration may reflect an honest belief that the world is whatever well-intentioned people like them say about it. So, Obama's critics should reconsider their assumption that he is cynical. It is his sincerity that is scary.”

George Will (1941) American newspaper columnist, journalist, and author

Column, February 7, 2014, "President Obama's Magic Words and Numbers" http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-president-obamas-magic-words-and-numbers/2014/02/07/220fbc04-8f76-11e3-84e1-27626c5ef5fb_story.html at washingtonpost.com. <br class="br">2010s

People, World, Sincerity

“Gordon Tullock, on the other hand, might be characterized as the somewhat cynical pragmatist, who set out to understand the world, not to change it. This side of Tullock is visible in his early paper on simple majority rule, and is perhaps most apparent in his work on rent seeking. These differences should not be pushed too far, however. Buchanan (1980) also contributed to the rent-seeking literature, and often has described public choice as “politics without romance.” One of the most dispiriting contributions to the public choice literature has to be Kenneth Arrow’s (1951) famous impossibility theorem. In a too little appreciated article, Tullock (1967b) demonstrated with the help of a somewhat torturous geometrical analysis, that the cycling that underlies the impossibility theorem is likely to be constrained to a rather small subset of Pareto-optimal outcomes, and thus Arrow’s theorem was “irrelevant,” a rather happy result, and one which anticipated work appearing more than a decade later on the uncovered set. In Chap. 10 of Toward a Mathematics of Politics, Tullock (1967a) engages in a bit of wishful thinking about constitutional design by describing how one could achieve an ideal form of proportional representation in a legislative body. He also was an early enthusiast of the potential for using a demand-revelation process to reveal individual preferences for public goods”

Dennis Mueller (1940) American economist

Tideman and Tullock 1976
James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and The Calculus (2012)

Happiness, World, Literature, Mathematics

“If the professors fail to come out with answers to questions posed by us, and to present the evidence in support of their statements, we shall be forced to conclude that far from being serious academicians, they are cynical politicians hawking ad hoc or plausible explanations in the service of a party line. In fact, we shall be justified in saying that they are not Marxists but Stalinists. Marxism is a serious system of thought which offers consistent explanations. Stalinism, on the other hand, is an exercise in suppressio veri suggestio falsi in pursuit of a particular end.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them, Volume II (1993)

Exercises, Question, Support

“It's like in most parts of America, where there was industry and there is no longer; there is cynicism mixed with sarcasm and some optimism. That's how my background influenced my comedy.”

Jim Gaffigan (1966) comedian, actor, author

Ben Fields (September 28, 2008) "Laugh Again with Gaffigan - Down-to-earth Gaffigan getting ready to bring 'Sexy' to the Keith", The Herald-Dispatch, p. 1.

Optimism, Parting

“[The atheist believes] a world marked by so much injustice, innocent suffering, and cynicism of power cannot be the work of a good God.”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

Encyclical Letter Spe Salvi of the Supreme Pontiff Benedict XVI to the Bishops Priests and Deacons Men and Women Religious and All the Lay Faithful On Christian Hope, 30 November 2007
2007

God, World, Suffering

“Look at you; you're on The New Democracy, considered the most brilliant weekly in the country, read by the men who do things and all that. What's your business? Why, to be as clever, as interesting, and as brilliantly cynical as possible about every man, doctrine, book, or policy that is assigned you to deal with. The more strong lights, the more spiritual scandal you can throw on the matter, the more money they pay you, the more the people buy the issue.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

Quoted, This Side of Paradise (1920)

Men, Money, People, Books

“For as long as possible, the learned collegium has tried to defend its integrity against the close combat of ideologico-critical exposures. Do not unmask, lest you yourself be unmasked could be the unspoken rule. It is no accident that the great representatives of critique—the French moralists, the Encyclopedists, the socialists, and especially Heine, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud—remain outsiders to the scholarly domain. In all of them there is a satirical, polemical component that can scarcely be hidden under the mask of scholarly respectability. These signals of a holy nonseriousness, which remains one of the sure indexes of truth, can be employed as signposts to the critique of cynical reason.”

Peter Sloterdijk (1947) German philosopher

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 18

Truth, Learning

“Cynicism is often seen as a rebellious attitude in western popular culture, but in reality, our cynicism advances the desires of the powerful: cynicism is obedience.”

Alex Steffen (1968) American writer and futurist

Go bright green | Review | Guardian Unlimited Books. http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2035002,00.html

Reality

“My grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis came to her home town of Staszów. A German soldier shot her dead in her bed. Madam Deputy Speaker, my grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza. The present Israeli government ruthlessly and cynically exploit the continuing guilt among Gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians. The implication is that Jewish lives are precious, but the lives of Palestinians do not count. On Sky News a few days ago, the spokeswoman for the Israeli Army Major Livovich was asked about the Israeli killing of, at that time, eight hundred Palestinians. The total is now a thousand. She replied instantly, "Five hundred of them were militants."”

Gerald Kaufman (1930–2017) British politician

That was the reply of a Nazi. I suppose the Jews fighting for their lives in the Warsaw Ghetto could have been dismissed as militants.
Speech to the House of Commons, Jan 2009

Home, Time, Fight, Dead

“I think cynicism is the worst thing because it kills everything. There’s no more honesty, no more poetry, no more freshness. Cynicism is the worst thing — a kind of smart person who’s got all the answers. This is death. It kills creation. There’s no love, no tenderness, nothing at all left. There’s no hatred even, nothing. Equally dangerous is the detached attitude that says, “Everything is fun!””

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) French photographer

Source: Henri Cartier-Bresson: Interviews and Conversations, 1951-1998, Conversation. Interview with Byron Dobell (1957), p. 38

Love, Death, Thinking, Personality

“…you know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you're cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism.”

W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) British playwright, novelist, short story writer

Source: Cakes and Ale: Or, The Skeleton in the Cupboard (1930), p. 137

Truth

“Some may wish to argue that Hayek was simply born with a sort of natural pessimism or cynicism, and that this generated his long standing belief in the inherent limitations that humans face when they try to intervene in social phenomena. Perhaps. But it is also possible that this view was the product of his having come of age during the final collapse of an already broken-down empire, of having experienced the multiple forms of disaster that surrounded postwar Vienna and enveloped interwar central Europe, and of having witnessed the failures of various high-minded social experiments to achieve anything like what their exponents had promised. In bearing witness to so much tragedy Hayek was again very much a part of the larger Austrian tradition. His famed ‘‘epistemic pessimism’’ may well have been another result of that larger experience.”

Bruce Caldwell (economist) (1952) economic historian

"Hayek and the Austrian tradition", in Edward Feser(ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hayek (2006)

Age, Failure, Nature, Parting

“"I think that you are a very brilliant man. I think that you have more courage than you have ever guessed. I think that you truly care about this city, and the people in it. I think your cynicism is a fraud." "What-what-really, this is astonishing-" "I think that if you were truly as corrupt and venal as you pretend, you would be in the Senate."”

Matthew Stover book Shatterpoint

Mace Windu and Colonel Lorz Geptun
Shatterpoint (2004)

People, Courage, Fraud, Thinking

“As good, naive Americans, we think that if only we can show the world the seriousness of the threat Saddam poses, then they will embrace our response. In our good, innocent way, we assume that in persuading our allies we are confronted with a problem of understanding. But suppose we are confronted with a problem of courage? Perhaps the French and the Germans are simply not brave enough to confront Saddam. Or suppose we are confronted with a problem of character? Perhaps the French and the Germans understand the risk Saddam poses to the world order. Perhaps they know that they are in danger as much as anybody. They simply would rather see American men and women--rather than French and German men and women--dying to preserve their safety. Far better, from this cynical perspective, to signal that you will not take on the terrorists--so as to earn their good will amidst the uncertain times ahead.”

David Brooks (1961) American journalist, commentator and editor

[David, Brooks, http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/002/215jfyfl.asp, French Kiss Off, Weekly Standard, February 6, 2003, May 24, 2011]
2000s

Women, Men, World, Way

“The doctrine of the cynics is the Ideal reversed, the parody of physical and moral beauty, the crime of mind, the degradation of imagination. I could not take pleasure in it. There was too much enthusiasm within me to permit me to crawl through those sinks of the brain. My nature had wings. The dangers to which I was exposed were above, not below.”

Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869) French writer, poet, and politician

Book VI, Note V, p. 86
Les confidences (1849)

Pleasure, Beauty, Imagination, Nature

“We cannot sit back and hope that everything works out for the best. We cannot afford to be tired or frustrated or cynical.”

Michelle Obama (1964) lawyer, writer, wife of Barack Obama and former First Lady of the United States

2010s, 2016 Democratic National Convention (2016)

Hope

“Don't let yourself become cynical. Cynicism is a cheap emotion, a craven substitute for thought and action. Cynicism corrodes the will, dulls the conscience, blunts your sense of right and wrong… Stay alert to fine distinctions: become a pessimist like me.”

Edward Abbey book Hayduke Lives

Hayduke Lives (1990)

Sense

“The last 20 years have· seen an enormous growth of institutions devoted to anthropological enterprises, membership within the discipline, and students, text books, and paraphernalia. From a tiny scholarly group that could easily be fitted into a couple of buses, and most of whom knew each other, we have grown into a group of tremendous, anonymous milling crowds, meeting at large hotels where there are so many sessions that people do well to find those of their colleagues who are interested in the same specialty. Today we look something like the other social science disciplines, suffering some of the same malaise, and becoming cynical about slave markets and worried when grants and jobs seem to be declining.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1970s, Changing Styles of Anthropological Work, 1973, p. 1

People, Books, Suffering, Science

“In the Renaissance there is much light, yes, and there is much in it with which Italians may share national pride. But there is much darkness. For the Renaissance is also the age of individualism, that through the splendid visions of poetry and art brought the Italian nation to the indifference, skepticism, and distracted cynicism of those who have nothing to defend, not in their family, their Fatherland, or in the world where every human personality conscious of its own value and personal dignity invest itself.”

Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944) Italian neo-Hegelian Idealist philosopher and politician

Che cosa è il fascismo: Discorsi e polemiche (“What is Fascism?”), Florence: Vallecchi, (1925) pp. 13-16

Age, World, Family, Art

“The only deadly sin I know is cynicism.”

Henry L. Stimson (1867–1950) United States Secretary of War

On Active Service in Peace and War (1948), Introduction

“To us, to me personally, this video is disgusting and reprehensible. It appears to have a deeply cynical purpose: to denigrate a great religion and to provoke rage.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Remarks at the Opening Plenary of the U.S.-Morocco Strategic Dialogue (13 September 2012) http://nicaragua.usembassy.gov/sp_120914_secstate_on_video_that_has_caused_violence.html <br class="br">Secretary of State (2009–2013)

Religion, Appearance, Rage, Personality

“As a writer you will know that one of the favourite fantasy plots of a writer is, a character's told 'you've got three months to live,' and who would you kill? I call my cancer Rupert, so I can get close to it. Because that man, Murdoch, is the one who, if I had the time (I've got too much writing to do…) I would shoot the bugger if I could. There is no one person more responsible for the pollution of what was already a fairly polluted press. And the pollution of the British press is an important part of the pollution of British political life, and it's an important part of the cynicism and misperception of our own realities that is destroying so much of our political discourse.”

Dennis Potter (1935–1994) English television dramatist, screenwriter and journalist

"The Long Goodbye," The Guardian (6 April 1994); the quote is from Potter's final television interview with Melvyn Bragg (5 April 1994)

Life, Reality, Time, Parting

“Cynics are all moralists, and merciless too.”

Indro Montanelli (1909–2001) Italian journalist

L'Italia giacobina e carbonara, Rizzoli, Milano 1972, p. 144.
1950s - 1990s

“Cynics and physics students put it like this:
:1. You can't win.
:2. You can't break even.
:3. You can't get out of the game.
:* Presenting a standard humorous summary of the three principal laws of thermodynamics in Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos : The Scientific Quest for the Secret of the Universe (1991), p. 106”

Dennis Overbye (1944) American writer

Secret, Law, Game, Universe

“If there exists one unique great imperial power which is always convinced that its most brutal interests coincide with the Good; if it is true that every year the USA spends more on their military budget than Russia, China, France, England and Germany put together; and if that Nation-State, devoted to military excess, has no public idol other than wealth, no allies other than servants, and no view of other peoples apart from an indifferent, commercial and cynical one; then the basic freedom of States, peoples and individuals consists in doing everything and thinking everything in order to escape, as much as possible, from the commandments, interventions and interference of that imperial power.”

Alain Badiou (1937) French writer and philosopher

From Philosophy and the 'war against terrorism in Infinite Thought: truth and the return of philosophy. London: Continuum, 2003. ISBN 0826467245.

People, Thinking, Freedom, Indifference

“One tries not to be cynical; after all, they are jumping around on the fuckin moon and no matter what you think of PIG NATION, you have to admit that it dies have a good special effects department.”

Abbie Hoffman book Woodstock Nation

Moonshine
Woodstock Nation (1969)

Thinking

“In such an environment there operates an unfortunate natural selection. Since not only the rewards but also the means and opportunities of public activity belong to the organized system, a bright boy will try to get ahead in it. He will do well in school, keep out of trouble, and apply for the right jobs. It would follow from this that the organized system is sparked by a good proportion of the bright boys, and so it is. On the other hand, in sheer self-protection, smart boys who are sensitive, have strong animal spirits or great souls, cannot play that game. There are two alternative possibilities: (1) Either the advantages of the organized system cause them to inhibit their powers, and they turn into cynical pushers or obsessional specialists or timid hard workers that make up the middle status of the system. Or (2) their natural virtues and perhaps alternative training are too strong and they become independents; but as such they are hard put, not so much hard put for money as for means to act; and so they are likely to become bitter, eccentric, etc., and so much the less effective in changing the system they disapprove”

Paul Goodman book Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. 157.

Money, School, Soul, Game

“Thwarted, or starved, in the important objects proper to young capacities, the boys and young men naturally find or invent deviant objects for themselves. … Their choices and inventions are rarely charming, usually stupid, and often disastrous; we cannot expect average kids to deviate with genius. But on the other hand, the young men who conform to the dominant society become for the most part apathetic, disappointed, cynical and wasted.”

Paul Goodman book Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. 13.

Men, Stupidity, Disappointment, Boy

“The schism between Christianity and the arts has had two profound consequences, two vast impoverishments--one for the arts world, the other for the Church. First, for the arts world, the loss of a transcendent religious vision, a refined and rigorous sense of the sacred, the breaking and discarding of the two thousand years of Christian mythos, symbolism, and tradition has left contemporary American art spiritually diminished. The shallow novelty, the low-cost nihilism, and the vague and sentimental spiritual pretensions of so much contemporary art—in every medium—are the legacy of this schism, as well as the cynicism that pervades the arts world”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

26
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), The Catholic Writer Today (2013)

World, Art, Sense, Loss

“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.”

Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) Art historian, broadcaster and museum director

Source: Civilisation (1969), Ch. 13: Heroic Materialism

Confidence

“There are cynics who deny the existence of human gratitude. But it seems that I am no cynic. So convinced am I of the existence of gratitude that I see in it one of our strongest oppositions. There are millions of persons who receive favors that they forget: but gratitude does exist, and they've got to express it somewhere. They take it out by being grateful to science for all that science has done for them, a gratitude, which, according to their dull perceptions won't cost them anything. So there is economic indignation against anybody who is disagreeable to science. He is trying to rob the people of a cheap gratitude.
I like a bargain as well as does anybody else, but I can't save expenses by being grateful to Science, if for every scientist who has perhaps been of benefit to me, there have been many other scientists who have tried to strangle that possible benefit.”

Charles Fort book Lo!

Pt 1, Ch. 4
Lo! (1931)

People, Science, Personality, Forgetting

“The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.”

Joyce Carol Oates (1938) American author

Do What You Will (1970), pt. 2, ch. 15

“That Somerset Maugham anthology Cakes and Ale. How destructive he is, venomous, pulling everything down in biting, corrosive cynicism. Yet somewhere deep down under all the conceit, sarcasm and snobbery is real quivering pain, helpless bewilderment at the inexplicable fact that human nature is chequered. And what perplexes him is less the common, mean element in decent people than the goodness and kindness of wicked, vicious ones.”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

Broken Lights Diaries 1955-57.

Pain, People, Nature

“She curled her lip. She had discovered cynicism.”

Keith Roberts book Pavane

Fifth measure “The White Boat” (p. 194)
Pavane (1968)

“What did I think about Brown? I’ve said before, I don’t like his kind of politics. I didn’t really meet him properly but I identify him with state, state-ism, with simultaneously high morals and low cynicism. I never identified with that kind of politics. The last gasps of this idea that through the state you can transform society but how that then automatically leads to a dependence on finance to fund it. I don’t think Gordon Brown redistributed power to people.”

Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman (1961) British philosopher

Interview with Inside Politics, 4 February 2015 https://www.holyrood.com/articles/inside-politics/architect-blue-labour-interview-lord-glasman

People, Idea, Thinking, Dependency

“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft, where we are hard, cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Rich Boy

"The Rich Boy" (1926), paragraph 3.
Often quoted as “The rich are different.”
Quoted

Way, Understanding

“[As graduates with] all the status and connections that degree confers, you don’t get to have no hands. No, you don’t get to be precious or cautious or cynical. No, not when the earth is warming and the oceans are rising. You don’t get to be cynical. Not when too many young people still languish in communities ripped apart by violence and despair. Not when women still make less than men for the same work. Not when millions of girls across the globe never set foot inside a school. (Applause.) No, not when many young people just like you — the men and women we honor this Memorial Day—have sacrificed their lives for your freedom to make your voice heard. You don’t get to have no hands.”

Michelle Obama (1964) lawyer, writer, wife of Barack Obama and former First Lady of the United States

2010s, Commencement speech for Oberlin College Prep graduates (2015)

Women, Men, People, School

“Cynicism about America’s current state of affairs is ultimately a form of surrender.”

Cory Booker (1969) 35th Class 2 senator for New Jersey in U.S. Congress

In [Booker, Cory, United: Thoughts on Finding Common Ground and Advancing the Common Good, https://books.google.com/books?id=iFekDQAAQBAJ, 2017, Random House Publishing Group, 978-1-101-96518-4], as quoted in [Yanklowitz, Rabbi Shmuly, Standing Together In the Era of National Division: Review of United by Cory Booker, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-shmuly-yanklowitz/standing-together-in-the-_b_9359900.html, 21 August 2018, The Huffington Post, March 3, 2016]
2016

“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.”

Tom Petty (1950–2017) American musician

Interview With Alan Bangs (1999)

People, Hope, Thinking

“What draws us to him so closely is that he combined a disillusioned estimate of human nature sufficient to launch twenty little cynics, with a craving for love any sympathy urgent enough to turn a weaker nature into a benign sentimentalist.”

Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946) British American-born writer

recounting Desmond McCarthy’s description of Samuel Johnson, “English Aphorists,” p. 138
Reperusals and Recollections (1936)

Love, Nature, Drawing

“Pro-slavery impulse still governs the Democratic Party, the party of government sinecures. It is the party that wants to use political power to tax us not for any common good, but to eat while we work. Consider the Great Society and its legacy. In the fall of 1964, I was on the speech-writing staff of the Goldwater campaign. In September and October I went on a number of forays to college campuses, where I debated spokesmen for our opponents. My argument always started from here. In 1964 the economy, thanks to the Kennedy tax cuts, was growing at the remarkable annual rate of four percent. But federal revenues were growing at 20 percent; five times as fast. The real issue in the election, I said, was what was to happen to that cornucopia of revenue. Barry Goldwater would use it to reduce the deficit and to further reduce taxes; Lyndon Johnson would use it to start vast new federal programs. At that point I could not say what programs, but I knew that the real purpose of them would be to create a new class of dependents upon the Democratic Party. The ink was hardly dry on the election returns before Johnson invented the war on poverty; and proved my prediction correct. One did not need to be cynical to see that the poor were not a reason for the expansion of bureaucracy; the expansion of bureaucracy was a reason for the poor. Every failure to reduce poverty was always represented as another reason to increase expenditures on the poor. The ultimate beneficiary was the Democratic Party. Every federal bureaucrat became in effect a precinct captain, delivering the votes of his constituents. His job was to enlarge the pool of constituents. But every increase in that pool meant a diminution of our property and our freedom.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

1990s, The Party of Lincoln vs. The Party of Bureaucrats (1996)

War, Failure, Freedom, Time

“Morality and expediency coincide more than the cynics allow.”

Roy Hattersley (1932) British Labour Party politician, published author and journalist

The Guardian, 30 September 1988

“I was a young man in the ’80s, and I was into medieval weapons, Harleys and Heavy Metal. I even played D&D back when that was supposed to induct players into real-life witchcraft. So I remember all the ridiculous superstition surrounding the secret meanings of ear piercing, the pseudo-paganism of Procter & Gamble, the seemingly Satanic messages in back-masking, and the allegedly suicidal insinuations of some metal albums. I attribute a lot of that to the fact that atheism didn’t have any appreciable presence back then. In those days, if you didn’t buy into Christian dogma and were openly critical of it, then you were a witch. You were either a neo-pagan or (more likely) you were Satanic. The latter would be applied regardless how you might prefer to identify. To my cultural experience, there was no such thing as a skeptic as that is known today. Back then, skeptics were considered cynics who refused to open their minds. It must have been a great time for paranoid Christian conservatives. They actually like Satanists a lot more than atheists. Because Satanists not only play the Christian game; they give Christians the moral high ground. Whereas atheists piss everybody off by pointing out that it is a game and that every believer in any religion is just pretending.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Patheos, Satanic Panic and Exorcism in Schools? http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2016/09/21/satanic-panic-and-exorcism-in-schools/ (September 21, 2016)

Life, Secret, Religion, Game

“If you focus your mind on the freedom and community that you can build by staying firm, you will find the strength to do it. "Stand for something, or you will fall for nothing."
And if cynics ridicule freedom, ridicule community… if "hard nosed realists" say that profit is the only ideal… just ignore them, and use copyleft all the same.”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

1990s, Copyleft: Pragmatic Idealism (1998)

Communication, Freedom

“No matter how cynical you become, it's never enough to keep up.”

Jane Wagner (1935) Playwright, actress

Lily
Unsourced variant: No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up.
The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe (1985)

“Intellectuals are cynical and cynics have never built a cathedral.”

Henry Kissinger (1923–2023) United States Secretary of State

As quoted in Sketchbook 1966-1971 (1971) by Max Frisch, p. 230
1970s

“Among other things, we are supposed to spot the toes of clay splaying out from under the pearl-gray spats, or the cloven hoof encased in the jackboot, before anyone else. Cynicism also is the touchstone of a reporter's alchemy through which he hopes to discover that nonexistent load called "objectivity." For as a set of philosophers, the only true objective reporter is the dead one.”

Bill Downs (1914–1978) American journalist

This I Believe (1951)

Hope, Dead

“Capitalism is being attacked not because it is inefficient or misgoverned but because it is cynical. And indeed a society based on the assertion that private vices become public benefits cannot endure, no matter how impeccable its logic, no matter how great its benefits.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1930s- 1950s, The Practice of Management (1954), p. 392

“I fell into conversation with Douglas. His is a split personality. À deux he is delightful; clever, funny, observant, drily cynical. But get him anywhere near "display mode", particularly if there are officials around, and he might as well have a corncob up his arse. Pompous, trite, high-sounding, cautiously guarded.”

Alan Clark (1928–1999) British politician

January 29, 1988; page 198.
Diaries: In Power (1993)

Personality

“In the night as he slept Boyd came to him and squatted by the deep embers of the fire as he'd done times by the hundreds and smiled his soft smile that was not quite cynical and he took off his hat and held it before him and looked down into it. In the dream he knew that Boyd was dead and that the subject of his being so must be approached with a certain caution for that which was circumspect in life must be doubly so in death and he'd no way to know what word or gesture might subtract him back again into that nothingness out of which he'd come. When finally he did ask him what it was like to be dead Boyd only smiled and looked away and would not answer. They spoke of other things and he tried not to wake from the dream but the ghost dimmed and faded and he woke and lay looking up at the stars through the bramblework of the treelimbs and he tried to think of what that place could be where Boyd was but Boyd was dead and wasted in his bones wrapped in the soogan upriver in the trees and he turned his face to the ground and wept.”

Cormac McCarthy book The Crossing

The Crossing (1994)

Life, Death, Smile, Dreams

“Barbarity's everywhere, that's the truth of it. Absolutely anyone is capable of absolutely anything.'
'My dear Papa, I had no idea you were such a cynic!'
'That's not cynicism, that's honesty — as you well know, dealing with criminals as you do, seeing the human race continually at its worst.”

Susan Howatch book The Wheel of Fortune

The Wheel of Fortune (1984), Part 1: Robert

Truth, Idea

“Bush is our fault. He's our fault because too many of us found it easier to hate him than find a way to love each other. If we work on the second thing a little harder, we won't need to rely on the cynics in the DLC to come up with the right "formula" the next time around. Because happiness and hope have a way of selling themselves.”

Matt Taibbi (1970) author and journalist

"Finding Love in Electoral Politics", AlterNet (13 November 2004)

Love, Hate, Happiness, Hope

“In his 1975 book, The Limits of Liberty, Buchanan returned to the study of constitutions, but now approached them with a somewhat more cynical (realistic?) Hobbesian perspective. His later books with Geoffrey Brennan (1980,1985) also emphasized the importance of constitutional rules as constraints on the selfish pursuits of individual actors, and as means for controlling that public sector beast—Leviathan. This concern with constitutional decision making and constitutional rules can be regarded as one of the salient characteristics of James Buchanan’s research throughout his career.”

Dennis Mueller (1940) American economist

James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and The Calculus (2012)

Books, Decision, Study, Selfishness

“As a little child, I remember having conflicts with other people over religion at 5-years-old, at 8-years-old, and without realising it. Certainly, not realising my whole life would be this whole argument. I would ask simple questions to my babysitter when I was a little boy, like, “How does Jesus turn water into wine? I know water is H2O. I know that wine is alcohol and fruit juice, and I don’t know what the chemical components of that are.” But as it turned out, when I grew up I looked it up. It is only the difference of a carbon atom. The molecules are much more complex. But they involve oxygen, hydrogen, and some additional carbons. That’s it. But all I knew at the time, water is H2O, and alcohol and fruit juice are something else. How does Jesus turn water from H2O into H2O and whatever else? I thought someone would give me some kind of intelligible answer. Like how Jesus does that, whether he uses telekinesis or whatever he does… But they don’t come up with explanations like that, they didn’t want explanations. They didn’t even want to believe people had explanations. When I was growing up, I found believers not only hated accurate scientific answers, but they hated any answer that sounded scientific. It was a funny thing. I was told all of the time that “sceptics were cynics” because we miss out on the big picture that only the believers can see.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Exclusive Interview with Aron Ra – Public Speaker, Atheist Vlogger, and Activist https://conatusnews.com/interview-aron-ra-past-president-atheist-alliance-america/, Conatus News (May 17, 2017)

Life, Hate, People, Alcohol

“I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope – an impotence, in short and to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all…”

John Fowles book Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

Failure, Effort

“Philosophical thinking peddles its wares today at a fair of self-sublations and falls head over heels in its eagerness to find favor with ironic, pragmatic, and strategic realisms. The risk of such realistic metamorphoses is obvious: It can easily end up by substituting the bad with something worse. It is a short step from the kynical "sublation" of philosophy to the cynical self-denial of what great philosophy had embodied in its best aspects.”

Peter Sloterdijk (1947) German philosopher

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 536

Thinking

“The cynic suffers the form of faith without love. Incredulity is his piety.”

James Richardson (1950) American poet

#16
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

Love, Faith, Suffering

“But that leads me to my third hard truth: something happens to people in law enforcement. Many of us develop different flavors of cynicism that we work hard to resist because they can be lazy mental shortcuts. For example, criminal suspects routinely lie about their guilt, and nearly everybody we charge is guilty. That makes it easy for some folks in law enforcement to assume that everybody is lying and that no suspect, regardless of their race, could be innocent. Easy, but wrong.”

James Comey (1960) American lawyer and the seventh director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

2010s, Hard Truths: Law Enforcement (2015)

People, Truth, Lie, Law

“But just because I believe that religion is a cynical perversion of the human spirit that exists purely for the benefit of the parasites we know as clergy, doesn't mean I'm not looking for answers to the big questions just like everybody else — you know, the questions that religion pretends it has answers to, because it knows that for some people, anyone answer is better than no answer at all. Questions like, Why are we here? Where did we come from? Where are we going?…Is there an afterlife, and if so, is it fully licensed for alcoholic drinks? That last bit may seem like a trivial concern to you, but not to me, because I live in a society where many people enjoy a social drink from time to time — not a huge amount, just enough to kill a horse. And in these enlightened days of the twenty-first century, when everyone's human rights and cultural identity are so very important, I don't see why I should have to abandon my culture, just because I'm dead. It's only the afterlife, not Saudi Arabia. Let's keep things in perspective. Of course in reality, we know that there will be beer in heaven, and lots of it, otherwise it wouldn't be heaven, would it? It's almost not even worth pointing that out, but I thought I would anyway, just in case someone wants to take the opportunity to be offended.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

"God is not enough" (23 May 2008) http://youtube.com/watch?v=1czXvHSjDac&feature=related) <br class="br">2008

People, Alcohol, Religion, Drink

“The pinning on of stars reaches its full cynical significance when sanctified valour and bereaved families are used to lend dignity to wars stupidly fought. The courageous and their families are drawn into a circular trap. The sacrificed soldier was valorous under the orders of a commander who has rewarded his effort. The battle was therefore worth fighting. Courage made it worthwhile. The basic rule of war — that it is fought to be won — has been forgotten.”

John Ralston Saul (1947) Canadian author and essayist

Voltaire's Bastards (1992)

War, Family, Star, Courage

“The last time I spoke here, I expressed the hope that life would return to normal. In some ways, it has. In others, it never will. Those of us who have lived through these challenging times have been changed by them. We've come to know truths that we will never question: evil is real, and it must be opposed. Beyond all differences of race or creed, we are one country, mourning together and facing danger together. Deep in the American character, there is honor, and it is stronger than cynicism. And many have discovered again that even in tragedy — especially in tragedy — God is near.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2002, State of the Union address (January 2002)

Life, God, Truth, Hope

“Cynicism is intellectual dandyism.”

George Meredith (1828–1909) British novelist and poet of the Victorian era

Source: The Egoist http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext99/egost11.txt (1879), Ch. 7.

“There is no inevitable connection between Christianity and cynicism. Truth is not a salad, is it, that you must always dress it with vinegar?”

William Morley Punshon (1824–1881) English Nonconformist minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 139.

Truth

“As for comics, one has only to turn to the characteristic output of Marvel Comics, for the period from about 1961 to about 1975, to find not an expression of base and cynical impulses but of good, old-fashioned liberal humanism of a kind that may strike us today, God help us, as quaint, but which nevertheless appealed, in story after story, to ideals such as tolerance, technological optimism, and self-sacrifice for the benefit of others.”

Michael Chabon (1963) Novelist, short story writer, essayist

Unpublished Letter of Complaint to The New York Review of Books

God, Fashion, Optimism, Help

“You're killing yourself with cynicism. Your idols got taken away from you one by one and now you have nothing to give your love to.”

Philip K. Dick book The Man in the High Castle

The Man in the High Castle (1962)

Love

“Educators know there are only two types of schooling: indoctrination and education.
Indoctrination teaches a student how to cleave to a party line, and to recite the slogans and bromides of the accepted conformity. He is taught only how to swallow lies, and there is no assurance he will not swallow the propaganda of foes as easily as that of friends. Such folk are hopelessly provincial to their time and place. Unable to distinguish truth from fable, they swallow both or spit both out, and become zealots, or, worse yet, cynics. The zealot holds that truth can be won with no effort; the cynic, that no effort will suffice.
Education teaches the art of skeptical inquiry. The student learns the thoughts of all the great minds of the past, so that the implications and mistakes of philosophy of various schools are not unknown to him. And he learns, first, current scientific theories and, second, how frail and temporary such theories can be. He learns to be undeceived by those who claim to know a last and final truth.”

John C. Wright (1961) American novelist and technical writer

Source: Titans of Chaos (2007), Chapter 22, “The Bubble Bath” (p. 309)

Truth, Education, School, Art

“Cynicism is enlightened false consciousness. It is that modernized, unhappy consciousness, on which enlightenment has labored both successfully and in vain. It has learned its lessons in enlightenment, but it has not, and probably was not able to, put them into practice. Well-off and miserable at the same time, this consciousness no longer feels affected by any critique of ideology; its falseness is already reflexively buffered.”

Peter Sloterdijk (1947) German philosopher

Zynismus ist das aufgeklärte falsche Bewußtsein, an dem Aufklärung zugleich erfolgreich und vergeblich gearbeitet hat. Es hat seine Aufklärungselektion gelernt, aber nicht vollzogen und wohl nicht vollziehen können. Gutsituiert und miserabel zugleich fühlt sich dieses Bewußtsein von keiner Ideologiekritik mehr betroffen; seine Falschheit ist bereits reflexiv gefedert.
Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), pp. 5-6

Feeling, Learning, Time, Falseness

“.. the moving whirlwind of modernity through its crowds, its cars, its telegraph poles, its bare, working-class neighbourhoods, its noises, its squeals, its violence, its cruelty, its cynicism, and its relentless pushiness.”

Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) Italian painter and sculptor

In Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008.
1914 - 1916, Pittura e scultura futuriste' Milan, 1914

Cars

Quotes about cynic page 2

Quotes about cynic
page 2