Seth Godin Quotes

I was giving up--being realistic, as people liked to say, meaning the same thing. Being realistic made me feel bitter.

I think I probably hoped for it a little bit, but I'm not an optimist. I'm a realist... or maybe even a pessimist.

Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.

I don't have high expectations anymore. Maybe they've just been beaten out of me.

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.

Cynicism is the easiest of all reactions, right? But it's also so disappointing and self-defeating.

You're the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in the expectation of extraordinary experiences: from books, from people, from journeys, from events, from what tomorrow has in store. But not you. You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst.

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.

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

One can never take the cynicism one comes across in life too seriously.

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.

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.

Pessimism, when you get used to it, is just as agreeable as optimism.

I think people in Europe are generally pessimistic about the future. They have low expectations; they're not working hard to change things. When you're a slacker with a pessimistic view of the future, you're likely to meet those expectations.

If one truly has lost hope, one would not be on hand to say so.

A pessimist is a person who has had to listen to too many optimists.

I used to be an optimist, but now I know that nothing is going to turn out as I expect.

The single biggest surprise about arriving to the Senate is the defeatist attitude here.

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

I don't have any illusions anymore. The illusion that rock 'n' roll could change anything - I don't believe that. I've changed.

A pessimist? That's a person who has been intimately acquainted with an optimist.

People have moved beyond apathy, beyond skepticism into deep cynicism.

We must break the cycle of cynicism that has hold of many of our youth.

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.

Everyone wrote me off, including me.