I find that the critics of voluntary service are all too often those who are prepared to accept such services when they require them but deride them with cynicism and scepticism when they see others helping and being helped.
...the player who looks least engaged may be the most committed member of the group. A cynic, after all, is a passionate person who does not want to be disappointed again.
A poet, any real poet, is simply an alchemist who transmutes his cynicism regarding human beings into an optimism regarding the moon, the stars, the heavens, and the flowers, to say nothing of the spring, love, and dogs.
Only a cynic can create horror--for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving demonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them.
I think the word 'earnest' kind of has a negative connotation on some level. I think one of the things that's happened is that being cynical is somehow conflated with being sophisticated. I think that's problematic, to say the least.
Reckless predictions of the second coming of Christ create an artificial excitement among believers followed by a corresponding depression. In addition, it hardens skeptics in their unbelief and provides new fodder for cynics to mock the Christian fa...
Americans are suffering so much from being in unrewarding environments that it has made us very cynical. I think that American suburbia has become a powerful generator of anxiety and depression.
Bush promised a foreign policy of humility and a domestic policy of compassion. He has given us a foreign policy of arrogance and a domestic policy that is cynical, myopic and cruel.
Doris: You have no values. With you its all nihilism, cynicism, sarcasm, and orgasm. Harry Block: Hey, in France I could run for office with that slogan, and win!
I'm cynical by nature, but I am also very hopeful because I see people from the Left and the Right showing up to these tea parties. You have people, bikers, union members and guys in three-piece suits showing up to these things.
Oscar Wilde always makes me smile - with respect and admiration. His short stories prove that it is possible to be both sarcastic, even cynical, but deeply compassionate. Just seeing the cover of one of Wilde's books in a bookshop makes me smile.
We always reference kids but very rarely ask their opinion. Our inexperience might be what gives us the ability to teach our elders something, due to the fact that we are not jaded or cynical.
I can say that even in the midst of my most cynical comic stripping: Opus shone through with a bit of heart, anchoring the ugly proceedings with a comforting pull of emotion.
I felt slightly superior to student politics, for instance. I had no reason to think this, but I thought of myself as slightly more seasoned. I became quite cynical talking to my student friends.
Working together during the past three years, we have confounded the skeptics and the cynics. We've shown that here in Virginia, Democrats and Republicans can come together, put politics aside, and make tough decisions when times demand it.
When a Cabinet Minister who is sacked for telling lies is re-appointed, in the face of every constitutional convention, only for the same man to be sacked again from the same Cabinet for the same offence by the same Prime Minister no wonder the publi...
GOD. Sometimes I think there might be a god out there, and that every once in a while he tunes in to see what we're up to, and have a good laugh at how we like to dress him up in various costume. Robes, thorny crowns, yarmulkes and curls, saris and b...
Cynicism, like gullibility, is a symptom of underdeveloped critical faculties.
There was something in her eyes that made me trust her. Maybe it was because they held the same cynicism, the same world-weariness I saw in my own every morning when I looked at myself in the mirror.
Political cynicism, disengagement, democratic decadence — call it what you will — is too often an excuse for physical and intellectual laziness.
I was a man fifteen years older than she, you understand. I had reached that stage in life where I identified with cynical villains in a book.
