Eric Bentley Quotes

People don't believe or understand that a community can lose hope. You can have a whole community where hopelessness is the norm, where folks don't have faith that things will get better because history and circumstances have proven over 30, 40, or 50 years that things don't get better.

I'd like to say things are bound to get better, but I don't really believe it.

Hopelessness is a feeling. It's not a fact.

If there is a chronic infirmity by which every teacher ought to be afflicted, it is, indeed, hope.

I don't like to sing things that just sound like they're going straight down the tubes, and they're circling the drain, and there's no hope. It doesn't feel good in any way to sing.

In the current climate, we live in a pessimistic and non-idealistic world.

Helplessness induces hopelessness, and history attests that loss of hope and not loss of lives is what decides the issue of war.

Despair is the conclusion of fools.

I find nothing more depressing than optimism.

To doubt is worse than to have lost; and to despair is but to antedate those miseries that must fall on us.

I think by now I have made it fairly clear that I am not very happy with the word hope. I don't believe in people just hoping.

I want you to take away the hope because that's the thing that's killing me.

I do get cynical, but what can you do? It doesn't make any difference.

Pessimism is rife in Israel.

When the calamity we feared is already arrived, or when the expectation of it is so certain as to shut out hope, there seems to be a principle within us by which we look with misanthropic composure on the state to which we are reduced, and the heart sullenly contracts and accommodates itself to what it most abhorred.

Despair is vinegar from the wine of hope.

Any system which says, This is a rotten world, wait for the next, give up, do nothing, succumb--that may be the basic Lie and if we participate in believing it and acting (or rather not acting) on it we involve ourselves in the Lie and suffer dreadfully... which only reinforces that particular Lie.

I would say that I am a jaded man beyond most expectations, but, like everyone else, I still have hope.

I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.

It is only a step from boredom to disillusionment, which leads naturally to self-pity, which in turn ends in chaos.

I'm so optimistic, it's depressing.

The belief that the good in American society will finally win out... I don't believe any more.

'Weary Willie' is very real to me. He is a man who has given up. The boat has gone and left him. The cards are stacked against him. He's content to make out with what he's got. He knows he'll go no further.

All hope abandon, ye who enter here!

My sweetest hope is to lose hope.