Charles A. Reich Quotes

I am not an idiot, and I'm not a Pollyanna sort of kumbaya type.

I prefer cynical people. Nice guys grow on trees.

I've yet to meet a bitter teenager. Bitterness, jealousy and jadedness, I think, are the most unattractive qualities in a person, and unfortunately they do seem to come with age.

I'm not as hopeful as I was when I was young.

Cynicism stems from disappointment. Cynical and faithless people were not always like that. They were filled with possibilities and hope as kids. But they tried and perhaps failed.

An optimist is a guy that has never had much experience.

You can't be idealistic in this world and not be crazy.

Remember, beneath every cynic there lies a romantic, and probably an injured one.

Idealist: a cynic in the making.

I've always had a tendency to be much more optimistic about people than I should be. I'd like to be a little shrewder.

There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.

I guess I don't have a grandiose view of the world in general, and I never believe it when someone else has a grandiose moment.

I went around in my teens and early 20s thinking that life was a con trick. I had managed to grow up believing in all sorts of romantic ideas about hard work and justice and truth, and it seemed the real world was much more complicated and shaded than I wanted to believe.

One cannot afford to be a realist.

I am an adult; deliberately naïve, dewy-eyed optimism is not the proper posture for a responsible adult, is it?

The man who isn't a pessimist is a damned fool.

An optimist is the person who has never had any experience at all.

I don't have a Pollyana attitude toward life that claims everything is lovely.

The problem with Raven is that she's so smart, so sometimes it's hard for her to be hopeful or idealistic, because she's so realistic. So even if she's working on a solution, she's not proud of it until it's concrete.

Well, I won't say I'm cynical. I'd say I'm pragmatic.

I'm not naive.

It's become hard for me to trust people and though I'm the type to go, 'everybody is born good,' you come to question that.

I'm not Pollyanna.

I've got a lot of experience under my belt, but I still have a very naive and idealistic outlook on life.

Back when I was an idealistic 18-year-old on my way to Chicago, I might have believed that being on the side of virtue would guarantee a good outcome. These many years later, I know better.