Best 424 quotes in «cynical quotes» category

Avoid cynical and negative people like the plague. They are killers of potential.

A woman tries to get all she can out of a man, and a man tries to get all he can into a woman.

Bob Dylan was again an entirely new person - this time old, craggy, cynical, and world-weary, as in "Not Dark Yet".

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.

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

Bush proposed a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Some saw the move as an attempt to preserve traditional values, while others saw it as a cynical ploy to ensure that Vice President... Cheney will never have to pay for his gay daughter's wedding.

By sixteen I thought, "Ah, this is all crap, you're all sheep, I'm not going to church, leave me alone." And then at a certain point in my teens I started to go to Catholic churches, by myself. Not because I wanted to be Catholic, but because I wanted to light a candle and say something like a prayer and just sit there. There was something I was missing or trying to reconnect with. But it was a secret at the time. I'd developed this cynical persona and the last thing I wanted to admit was that I was skulking around churches in my spare time.

Be sure that you first preach by the way you live. If you do not, people will notice that you say one thing, but live otherwise, and your words will bring only cynical laughter and a derisive shake of the head.

Cannes is a very strange place. I tried to show up as best I could and to try not to be cynical.

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.

Charitable endeavour exalts the prestige and the status of the giver. This may sound unduly cynical but as with all philantrophic activity, it is not easy to unravel the mutually reinforcing motives of selflessness and self-interest. All that can safely be said is that most members of the royal family have difficulty distinguishing between concern about society, concern about the social order and concern about what best to do so they can remain at the top of it.

Concerning politics: "The American media is like a watchdog who has developed an affection for the burglar.

Conscience is what your mother told you before you were six years old.

Cynical? Thats my fascination. I do hateful things, for which people love me, And lovable things for which they hate me. I am a friend of enemies, the enemy of friends; I am admired for my detestability. I am both Poles and the Equator, with no Temperate Zones between.

Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.

Cynics regarded everybody as equally corrupt... Idealists regarded everybody as equally corrupt, except themselves.

Cynical is a fool's word for realist.

Cynically speaking, one could say that it is true to life to be cynical about it.

Cynicism is something that is part of the media production of a certain type of subjectivity or consciousness that is passive and disempowered, cynical, fatalistic, pessimistic.

Democracy: a festival of mediocrity.

Despite his cynical exterior, he had a good heart-and Lissa owned most of it.

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.

Despite all the cynical things writers have said about writing for money, the truth is we write for love. That is why it is so easy to exploit us.

Don't become cynical. Don't give up hope. Don't believe that everything is judged only by expediency. There is idealism in this world. There is human brotherhood.

Don't give up on your ideals. Don't compromise. Don't turn to expediency. And for heaven's sake . . . don't get cynical.

Don't get cynical. Don't ever think you can't make a difference.

Do you want to injure someone's reputation? Don't speak ill of him, speak too well.

Everybody's got a dud. You can't get out of it. That's the price of admission: you'll get some duds. You'll get some things where you missed a little. It's a crap feeling when you're going through it. But the main thing is as long as you're not doing anything for cynical reasons, then you'll be okay.

Don’t talk like that, Dill,” said Aunt Alexandra. “It’s not becoming to a child. It’s – cynical.” “I ain’t cynical, Miss Alexandra. Tellin’ the truth’s not cynical, is it?” “The way you tell it, it is.

Calvin: Trick or treat! Adult: Where's your costume? What are you supposed to be? Calvin: I'm yet another resource-consuming kid in an overpopulated planet, raised to an alarming extent by Madison Avenue and Hollywood, poised with my cynical and alienated peers to take over the world when you're old and weak... Am I scary, or what?

Every revolutionary ends up either by becoming an oppressor or a heretic.

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

Exercise caution in your business affairs; for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals; and everywhere life is full of heroism. Be yourself. Especially, do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass.

False hope really makes you cynical.

Experience is a good teacher, but she sends in terrific bills.

Flattery is like chewing gum. Enjoy it but don't swallow it.

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

Fulfillment of desire taken to extremes doesn't necessarily make us happy. It tends to make us rather cynical.

Global terrorism is extreme both in its lack of realistic goals and in its cynical exploitation of the vulnerability of complex systems.

Harvard takes perfectly good plums as students, and turns them into prunes.

Every country has the government it deserves.

Generally I don't like doing remakes, but I think that's more in the cynical world of Hollywood where normally remakes are purely for commercial reasons.

George Bush and John Ashcroft were religious in a scary way, but the rational among us could always take heart that, deep down, the Bush administration was more cynical than messianic.

Hippy, you think everything is a conspiracy. Everything is!

Hatred is a very underestimated emotion.

How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?

How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?

Humans have always preferred to live their lives​ by daylight. I used to think it was because human beings have crappy night vision, and it wasn't until I got older and more cynical that I realized it was because they have less to be afraid of during the day.

I am a cynical optimist. Big opening weekends are like cotton candy. The films you will remember over time are the films that stick in the consciousness of the audience in a good way.

Here I was in Estonia, doing a concert for 5,000 people, and not many people know the song My Way - Gorbachev in the 80s, My Way had just become a famous song, and [Mikhail] Gorbachev in a satirical, kind of cynical manner coined the term the Sinatra Doctrine and My Way was the song because the Baltic states in the Warsaw Pact wanted to go their own way and secede from the Soviet Union, so joking he says," Yeah, we've got the Sinatra Doctrine now.