Cynicism Quotes - Page 7

• Cynicism formulates issues clearly, but only to dismiss them.

  Mason Cooley

  Issues

  "City Aphorisms, Sixth Selection". Book by Mason Cooley, 1989.

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• Cynicism often draws correct conclusions, but nobody could live by its lights.

  Mason Cooley

  Light, Conclusion, Live By

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• Are there people to aspire to? Can people be strong enough to withstand all of this disillusionment? Maybe the time is right for people to emerge from the easy cynicism and try to get back to a place where we can actually believe in people and trust people to have proper motivations.

  Brendan Gleeson

  Strong, Motivation, Believe

  Source: collider.com

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• I have a healthy cynicism, but not anger.

  Sheryl Crow

  Healthy

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• There are many different kinds of doubt. When we doubt the future, we call it worry. When doubt other people we call is suspicion. When we doubt ourselves we call it inferiority. When we doubt God we call it unbelief. When we doubt what we hear on television we call it intelligence! When we doubt everything we call it cynicism or skepticism.

  Rick Warren

  People, Worry, Doubt

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• We hardly need to be reminded that we are living in an age of confusion - a lot of us have traded in our beliefs for bitterness and cynicism or for a heavy package of despair, or even a quivering portion of hysteria. Opinions can be picked up cheap in the market place while such commodities as courage and fortitude and faith are in alarmingly short supply.

  Edward R. Murrow

  Hysteria, Confusion, Despair

  "This I Believe" radio program, thisibelieve.org. 1951.

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• Realism has always been called cynicism.

  Gore Vidal

  Realism

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• Skepticism turns to cynicism, which leads to apathy and despair, which can cause sleeplessness, dry-mouth, and loss of sex drive?

  Al Franken

  Sex, Loss, Despair

  "Why Not Me?". Book by Al Franken, www.cnn.com. January 12, 1999.

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• That so much of our experience, or the stereotype which passes for it should be dealt with by means of the short story is perhaps a symptom not unnoticeable elsewhere in the public domain of an unlovely cynicism about human character.

  Howard Nemerov

  Mean, Character, Stories

  Howard Nemerov (1993). “A Howard Nemerov Reader”, p.186, University of Missouri Press

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• I don't think of myself as particularly earnest. I have long bouts of cynicism and skepticism. So much of my early life was full of uncertainties. It still is. My "Buddha book" expresses that. Perhaps that's what created this impression of earnestness.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Book, Thinking, Long

  Interview with Sarah Fay, staging.believermag.com. March 2007.

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• I think if you see that no one is going to laugh at you for it, I think the concept of living nicely will be infectious. I believe there is room for the absence of cynicism.

  Mitch Leigh

  Believe, Thinking, Laughing

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• The larger an English industry was, the more likely it was to go bankrupt, because the English were not naturally corporate people; they disliked working for others and they seemed to resent taking orders. On the whole, directors were treated absurdly well, and workers badly, and most industries were weakened by class suspicion and false economies and cynicism. But the same qualities that made English people seem stubborn and secretive made them, face to face, reliable and true to their word. I thought: The English do small things well and big things badly.

  Paul Theroux

  Order, Class, People

  Paul Theroux (2006). “The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey Around the Coast of Great Britain”, p.220, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Never surrender to cynicism, even if you suspect it would get the critics on your side.Never surrender to cynicism, even if you suspect it would get the critics on your side.

  Roselyne Bosch

  Your Side, Sides, Surrender

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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• One can never take the cynicism one comes across in life too seriously.

  Kevin Spacey

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• I really like dark music and darkness in general and cynicism and pessimism and negativity because it allows you to create an even bigger contrast.

  Andrew W.K.

  Dark, Negativity, Pessimism

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• Golf cannot be played in anger, or in any mood of emotiional excess. Half the golf balls struck by amateurs are hit if not in rage surely in bewilderment, or gloom, or in cynicism, or even hysterically - all of those emotional excesses must be contained by the professional. Which is why balance is one of the essential ingredients of golf. Professionals invariably trudge phlegmatically around the course - whatever emotions are seething within - with the grim yet placid and bored look of cowpokes, slack-bodied in their saddles, who have been tending the same herd for two months.

  George Plimpton

  Golf, Emotional, Two

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• Remember, you cannot be both young and wise. Young people who pretend to be wise to the ways of the world are mostly just cynics.

  Stephen Colbert

  Wise, Remember You, Remembers You

  Stephen Colbert Commencement Address, departments.knox.edu. June 2006.

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• I'm an eternal optimist with a small degree of cynicism.

  Sarah McLachlan

  Degrees, Optimist, Eternal

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• Cynicism can be funny. But it's the easy way. You'll forget to enjoy anything. I try to make the evolving choice, the forward-moving, life-giving choice. Just keep living, man.

  Matthew McConaughey

  Moving, Men, Giving

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• For me, a really radical position for journalism to take is to stop being cynical. Cynicism is what passes for insight among the mediocre.

  Joe Klein

  Cynical, Journalism, Mediocre

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• For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle - as we did in the OJ trial - or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright's sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words.

  Barack Obama

  Inspiring, Country, Believe

  A More Perfect Union, delivered 18 March 2008, Philadelphia, PA

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• To give [the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba] even covert support is on a par with the hypocrisy and cynicism for which the United States is constantly denouncing the Soviet Union in the United Nations and elsewhere. This point will not be lost on the rest of the world, nor on our own consciences.

  J. William Fulbright

  War, Pigs, Giving

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• But there's a fourth interpretation: Obama can't leave his comfort zone. No president since Woodrow Wilson has been as enamored of abstract ideas or more sure that disagreement with him is proof of ignorance, bad faith or dogmatism. As a candidate, he insisted his real opponent was 'cynicism,' and in his address last week, he returned to this trite formulation, insisting again he was bravely battling the cynics.

  Jonah Goldberg

  Real, Ignorance, Ideas

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• Christianity not only saves you from sin, but from cynicism.

  E. Stanley Jones

  Sin, Christianity

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• The end of an age is always a time of turmoil, war, economic catastrophe, cynicism, lawlessness and distress. But it is also an era of heightened challenge and creativity, of issues, and their world-wide scope, never has an era faced a more demanding and exciting crisis. This then, above all else, is the great and glorious era to live in, a time of of opportunity, one requiring fresh and vigorous thinking, indeed, a glorious time to be alive.

  R.J. Rushdoony

  War, Creativity, Thinking

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