Rutger Bregman Quotes

If you're really invested in feeling bad about the world, there are a lot of media outlets out there that you can turn to.

People tend to dwell more on negative things than on good things. So the mind then becomes obsessed with negative things, with judgments, guilt and anxiety produced by thoughts about the future and so on.

Basically I wake up in the morning and I think everything's going to be great. I'm really kind of optimistic, and I look forward to a new day. I pick up 'The New York Times,' and I look at the front page and realize that once again I'm wrong. I start to fixate on stuff.

One thing I've very quickly learned is that if you wake up every morning worrying about what's in the press, you would go completely and utterly potty.

I think one thing that does cause unhappiness is protracted anxiety and worry.

When you're watching the news, how many days in a row can you watch that and feel good about yourself and the world?

I'm prone to a more depressed outlook on life.

Well I do think there are people who are habitually negative and depressed and take the opposite approach because they imagine the worst, and their minds become dominated by that. They let their own emotions and expectations transform their perceptions of the world.

I was a very fearful little kid, and I would always see the worst in everything. The glass was half-empty. I would see people kissing, and I would think one was trying to bite the other.

Depression is a situation of self-fulfilling pessimism.

I am so not hooked into watching TV or listening to the radio, to be honest. Usually, when I do, I get angry.

When we anticipate, we're the happiest. Unless you're on antidepressants. The reason you take antidepressants is because you can't anticipate. You think everything's going to be horrible, so it usually is.

Generally, I'm a pretty positive, but like any other working person, if the jobs aren't coming in, I do get depressed.

I want no part of making any contribution whatsoever to the despair which eventually follows downbeat thinking.

Cynics will say there are no good people out there. And if you read the papers and watch TV news you could be convinced of that. But there are good people.

So many people are walking around looking so grim all the time. I just never understand why.

I sometimes have a tendency to walk on the dark side.

The worse the newspapers speak of the world, the better I feel.

I don't have control over what's on screen, and that's terrifying.

I say there're no depressed words just depressed minds.

The entertainment world, television, movies, social media, YouTube stuff, we're so bombarded with so much imagery and such a great sense of inhumanity, and there is a coarseness, a coarsening of interaction.

Clinically speaking, depression is a pessimistic sense of your own capabilities, and despondent lack of energy.

Bad news sells because the amygdala is always looking for something to fear.

Yes, I suffer terribly from depression. I have to work at being happy, it's not my natural instinct. My natural instinct is, if something wonderful happens, to throw water in my own face.

I watch one news channel until my soul can't take it anymore. It's the background of my life.