Cynical quotes
406 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
"An Honest politician will not be tolerated by a democracy unless he is very stupid ... because only a very stupid man can honestly share the prejudices of more than half the nation."
"I am neither bitter nor cynical but I do wish there was less immaturity in political thinking."
"Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy."
"Harvard takes perfectly good plums as students, and turns them into prunes."
"Hatred is a very underestimated emotion."
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"I like threesomes with two women, not because I'm a cynical sexual predator. Oh no! But because I'm a romantic. I'm looking for "The One." And I'll find her more quickly if I audition two at a time."
"Marriage is neither heaven nor hell, it is simply purgatory."
"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..."
"A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world. That means trying to understand, take in, connect with, what wickedness human beings are capable of; and not be corrupted - made cynical, superficial - by this understanding."
"It will never be possible for any length of time for any group of the American people, either by reason of wealth or learning or inheritance or economic power, to retain any mandate, any permanent authority to arrogate to itself the political control of American public life."
"No persons are more frequently wrong, than those who will not admit they are wrong."
"My church accepts all denominations - fivers, tenners, twenties."
"Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. People don't become inured to what they are shown — if that's the right way to describe what happens — because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling."
"Democracy: a festival of mediocrity."
"Society is infected with rude, cynical, restless, and frivolous persons who prey upon the rest, and whom no public opinion concentrated into good manners, forms accepted by the sense of all, can reach; the contradictors and railers at public and private tables, who are like terriers, who conceive it the duty of a dog of honor to growl at any passer-by, and do the honors of the house by barking him out of sight."
"The function of muscle is to pull and not to push, except in the case of the genitals and the tongue."
"That a peasant may become king does not render the kingdom democratic."
"The natural cause of the human mind is certainly from credulity to skepticism."
"Conscience is what your mother told you before you were six years old."
"It is time to provide a smashing answer for those cynical men who say that a democracy cannot be honest, cannot be efficient.... We have in the darkest moments of our national trials retained our faith in our own ability to master our own destiny."
"If you can fall in love again and again if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical you've got it half licked."
"I am supporting David Cameron purely out of cynical self-interest."
"Politics is almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times."
"I'm a cynical idealist."
"It is sad but unfortunately true that man learns nothing from history."
