Cynicism Quotes

It is difficult not to write satire.

Juvenal

The cynic is one who never sees a good quality in a man, and never fails to see a bad one. He is the human owl, vigilant in darkness and blind to light, mousing for vermin, and never seeing noble game.

Henry Ward Beecher

I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are good people and bad people. You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people,

Terry Pratchett

What arouses the indignation of the honest satirist is not, unless the man is a prig, the fact that people in positions of power or influence behave idiotically, or even that they behave wickedly. It is that they conspire successfully to impose upon the public a picture of themselves as so very sagacious, honest and well-intentioned.

Claud Cockburn

Nothing is more discouraging than unappreciated sarcasm.

Source Unknown

If there was anything that depressed him more than his own cynicism, it was that quite often it still wasn't as cynical as real life.

Terry Pratchett

Cynic, n: a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.

Ambrose Bierce

CYNIC: One who not only reads bitter lessons from the past, but who is prematurely disappointed with the future.

Source Unknown

A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.

Oscar Wilde

Fools are my theme, let satire be my song.

Lord (George Gordon) Byron

Satire is focused bitterness.

Leo Rosten

A cynic can chill and dishearten with a single word.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Don't be a cynic and disconsolate preacher. Don't bewail and moan. Omit the negative propositions. Challenge us with incessant affirmatives. Don't waste yourself in rejection, or bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It takes a clever man to turn cynic and a wise man to be clever enough not to.

Fannie Hurst

Cynicism is the humor of hatred.

Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree

The only deadly sin I know is cynicism.

Henry Lewis Stimson

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.

George Bernard Shaw

Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the devil; for which reason I have long since as good as renounced it.

Thomas Carlyle

The satirist who writes nothing but satire should write but little -- or it will seem that his satire springs rather from his own caustic nature than from the sins of the world in which he lives.

Anthony Trollope

I believe no satirist could breathe this air. If another Juvenal or Swift could rise up among us tomorrow, he would be hunted down. If you have any knowledge of our literature, and can give me the name of any man, American born and bred, who has anatomized our follies as a people, and not as this or that party; and who has escaped the foulest and most brutal slander, the most inveterate hatred and intolerant pursuit; it will be a strange name in my ears, believe me.

Charles Dickens