I'm too cynical to be an optimist.
If I'm breathing in 2016, I'll be happy.
I think that one of the things that is happening in the so-called "clash of civilizations" is that the confidence that was once obvious in the Western Judeo-Christian tradition has been weakened tremendously. There's a feeling that there's a cynical, corporate layer that's really driving it - one that's ready to compromise - and that the real confident energy around the world is coming from Islam, that the believers take their own faith at face value and with great confidence and in far greater numbers.
A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself.
The most essential mental quality for a free people, whose liberty is to be progressive, permanent and on a large scale, is much stupidity.
There is nothing so absurd or ridiculous that has not at some time been said by some philosopher.
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.
I've always been a fan first and foremost - obsessing over bands and seeking out bands, and spending hours and hours listening. When I played music, the scope of my fandom became more myopic; I was focusing on the bands we were touring with, or the bands on the label. And you're always positing yourself in relation to other bands. Since I haven't been playing, I feel a little less cynical. I'm able to seek out music and approach it strictly as a fan.
My church accepts all denominations - fivers, tenners, twenties.
I think, something that you might be able to locate in the work that I'm creating today: the ability to look at a black America as something that not only can be mined in a very sort of cynical, cold way, but also embraced in a very personal, love-driven way; but also sort of critiqued.
It’s too bad that stupidity isn’t painful.
That's the hardest thing of all--never to become cynical, never to lose faith, never to become indifferent.
For better or for worse, I've watched people die in front of me. I see how they are in the end. And they're not cynical. In the end, they wanna hold somebody's hand. And that's real to me.
As you get older, you just lose that confidence and narcissism you have in your twenties. You realize you have less time on the planet, and you become cynical and less confident.
Never stir up litigation. A worse man can scarcely be found than one who does this.
The only force more ruthless and cynical than the business of big politics is the politics of big business.
A comedian's a comedian. They're a very kind of cynical bunch. I guess that's why I like them.
Most of the writers in TV are from L. A. or New York, and those are places where people are cynical and snarky. And they fly from L. A. to New York in an airplane over this vast, expansive land where people aren't snarky; they're a lot more like the 'Parks and Rec' characters.
I'm a very jaded and cynical person.
Revolution, n. In politics, an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment.