Sad Cynical Quotes

Some things will never seem adequate
no matter how hard we try.
- from the movie White Man's Burden

Speak when you are angry -
and you will make the best speech you'll ever regret.
- Laurence J. Peter

It is far better to be alone,
than to be in bad company.
- George Washington

Life ... full of loneliness, and misery,
and suffering, and unhappiness,
and it's all over much too quickly.
- the Woody Allen movie Annie Hall

Yesterday is like a dung heap;
you can complain about the smell,
or you can use it to fertilize tomorrow's garden.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training,
for it trains people as to how they should think.
- Arthur Schopenhauer

Morality is simply the attitude we adopt
towards people whom we personally dislike.
- Oscar Wilde

If you are not one of us, you are one of them.
- the movie The Matrix (1999)

Love conquers all things except poverty and a toothache.
- Mae West

Life is like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute -
only the last couple seconds are fatal,
but most people are scared to death the whole way down.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

However beautiful the strategy,
you should occasionally look at the results.
- Winston Churchill

Honesty is the best policy - when there is money in it.
- Mark Twain

Those who play with the devil's toys
will be brought by degrees to wield his sword.
- R. Buckminster Fuller

Man knows so much and does so little.
- R. Buckminster Fuller

The moral arc of the universe
bends at the elbow of justice.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully
as when they do it from religious conviction.
- Blaise Pascal

The very ink with which all history
is written is merely fluid prejudice.
- Mark Twain

We are stripped bare by the curse of plenty.
- Winston Churchill

For me every ruler is alien that defies public opinion.
- Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi

Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.
- Robert A. Heinlein

I won't miss you.
I will miss who I thought you were.
- Anonymous

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
- Henry David Thoreau

If misery loves company, misery has company enough.
- Henry David Thoreau

It takes a long while for a naturally trustful person
to reconcile himself to the idea that
after all God will not help him
- H. L. Mencken

People do not like to think.
If one thinks, one must reach conclusions.
Conclusions are not always pleasant.
- Helen Keller

The world is a mirror for anger,
which returns to its source as burning torment.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of,
he always declares that it's his duty.
- George Bernard Shaw

The one who loves the least, controls the relationship.
- Robert Anthony

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live,
it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
- Oscar Wilde

Stupid is as stupid does.
- the movie Forrest Gump (1994)

By all means marry.
If you get a good wife, you'll be happy.
If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher
and that is a good thing for any man.
- Socrates

Sometimes, indeed, there is such a discrepancy
between the genius and his human qualities
that one has to ask oneself whether
a little less talent might not have been better.
- Carl Jung

The rich are not born skeptical or cynical.
They are made that way by events, circumstances.
- Paul Getty

Is That All There Is?
- Peggy Lee

The road to perdition has ever been
accompanied by lip service to an ideal.
- Albert Einstein

We are all so much together,
but we are all dying of loneliness.
- Albert Schweitzer

A competent and self-confident person is
incapable of jealousy in anything.
Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.
- Robert A. Heinlein

It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble.
It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.
- Mark Twain (attributed)

Inside every cynical person,
there is a disappointed idealist.
- George Carlin

There are three rules for dating:
1) Don't;
2) If you must, just be careful;
3) Forget the rules, your hormones will win anyway.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Never trust a man who speaks well of everybody
- John Churton Collins

A wise girl kisses but doesn't love,
listens but doesn't believe,
and leaves before she is left.
- Marilyn Monroe

When you have to kill a man,
it costs nothing to be polite.
- Winston Churchill

Love thy neighbor -
and if he happens to be tall,
debonair and devastating,
it will be that much easier.
- Mae West

One man's "magic" is another man's engineering.
"Supernatural" is a null word.
- Robert A. Heinlein

If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?
- Abraham Lincoln

Vengeance: "It's your fault; you must pay; you must bleed."
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

The claim "I was only following orders" has been used
to justify too many tragedies in our history.
- Captain Picard of the television series
STAR TREK: The Next Generation

After the first blush of sin, comes its indifference.
- Henry David Thoreau

We're more popular than Jesus now;
I don't know which will go first, rock 'n' roll or Christianity.
- John Lennon

The function of muscle is to pull and not to push,
except in the case of the genitals and the tongue.
- Leonardo da Vinci

If at first you don't succeed,
try, try, and try again.
Then give up.
There's no use being a damned fool about it.
- W. C. Fields

I always avoid prophesying beforehand,
because it is a much better policy to prophesy
after the event has already taken place.
- Winston Churchill

Many a man owes his success to his first wife
and his second wife to his success.
- Jim Backus

The lion and the calf shall lie down together,
but the calf won't get much sleep.
- Woody Allen

The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything
save our modes of thinking
and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.
- Albert Einstein

Love is a grave mental disease.
- Plato

Just when I discovered the meaning of life, they changed it.
- George Carlin

The rarest quality in an epitaph is truth.
- Henry David Thoreau

The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
- Arabic Proverb and Chinese Proverb

The more he became truly wise,
the more he distrusted everything he knew.
- Voltaire

Politics is like football; if you see daylight, go through the hole.
- John F. Kennedy

Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.
- H. L. Mencken

The best argument against democracy is
a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
- Winston Churchill

Life is just one damned thing after another.
- Elbert Hubbard (Philistine - A Periodical of Protest, 1896)

Having two bathrooms ruined the capacity to co-operate.
- Margaret Mead

The most difficult thing in the world
is to know how to do a thing
and to watch somebody else doing it wrong,
without comment.
- Theodore. H. White

God has cared for these trees,
saved them from drought, disease, avalanches,
and a thousand tempests and floods.
But he cannot save them from fools.
- John Muir

In the course of my life, I have often had to eat my words,
and I must confess that I have always found it a wholesome diet.
- Winston Churchill

The will to believe chases out the rational mind,
whenever and wherever the two come into conflict.
- Philip K. Dick

The means by which we live have outdistanced
the ends for which we live.
Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power.
We have guided missiles and misguided men.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.