Elizabeth Janeway Quotes

I have a grim outlook on the world, and in particular on humanity. Spent years denying it, but I am very misanthropic. And I live alone on a mountain for a reason.

I got fed up with the human race, really. I got a very negative feeling about human potentials. And for a while, I thought I might write a book without any human beings in it whatsoever.

If one looks with a cold eye at the mess man has made of history, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that he has been afflicted by some built-in mental disorder which drives him towards self-destruction.

Man has the power to act as his own destroyer - and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.

Humanity, you never had it from the beginning." That was my motto.

I don't know whether I'm misanthropic. It seems to me I'm constantly disappointed. I'm very easily disappointed.

No matter how cynical you become, it's never enough to keep up.

Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people who think the human race is beneath their notice, that they're better than other human beings.

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'm rather a cynic, I suppose. I do not believe in the niceness of humanity.

We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.

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

Humanity, you never had it to begin with.

No one's really happy anyway, it's not human.

If human beings were shown what they're really like, they'd either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.

Hope is a tease designed to prevent us from accepting reality.

Cynicism, I contend, is the wailing of someone who believes that things are, or should be, or could be, much, much better than they are.

As a Scandinavian, I like hopelessness and the weird austerity in the hopelessness of things.

I don't hope for anything. Not only in my professional life, but in my family life also. My total lifestyle is like that.

She passed these years in a distant corner of her mind. A dry, barren field, out beyond wish and lament, beyond dream and disillusionment. There, the future did not matter. And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and it accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion.

I have been reading the morning paper. I do it every morning-knowing well that I shall find in it the usual depravities and basenesses and hypocrisies and cruelties that make up civilization, and cause me to put in the rest of the day pleading for the damnation of the human race. I cannot seem to get my prayers answered, yet I do not despair.

In a world that's ugly and a lie, it's hard to even want to try.

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

People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone.