Pearl S. Buck Quotes

We are creating a generation that is losing hope, and when people don't have hope then they have nothing to lose. And when people have nothing to lose it's a short step to rob or loot or riot or burn or even kill.

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.

The worst thing that can happen in a democracy - as well as in an individual's life - is to become cynical about the future and lose hope.

Without hope, the very fabric of our society will fall apart.

Many of the young people living in inner-city America don't see themselves - I mean, they even talk about things like death and dying. And there's a tremendous loss of hope. And of all the things to lose, I think nothing is worse or more difficult to overcome than the loss of hope.

All this time…ever since I sold my soul, I’ve been clinging to this idea that there is something pure and decent out there. That there was something to give me hope that even if I was a lost cause, at least there was something bright and good in the world. But there isn’t. If there was, Seth wouldn’t have fallen. Erik wouldn’t have died. Andrea Mortensen wouldn’t be dying.” -Georgina to Carter

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

I am more weary of life, I think, than ever I was.

All hope abandon, ye who enter here!

Nobody's interested in sweetness and light.

I do not write often now - not for want of something to say, but from a loathing of all I see and hear. Why dwell upon it?

Loss of hope rather than loss of life is what decides the issues of war. But helplessness induces hopelessness.

Marriage is the death of hope.

The Opera was a very cold film, a hopeless and dark film, no hope, no love.

To become a villain, you had to have become disillusioned, and in order to become disillusioned you had to have been passionate about something you believed in that was shaken and ripped from your grasp as a protagonist in that stage of your life, leaving you disillusioned with God, if you will.

The reason for the sadness of this modern age and the men who live in it is that it looks for the truth in everything and finds it.

With the sinking of high human trust, the dignity of life sinks too.

Young people who have no future will easily give up their future, which they can't see on the horizon.

We need hope. There's nothing worse than to live a life of despair. For a person to have no hope just sucks the blue out of every sky.

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.

It is the absence of hope, which equals the despair that is the punishment.

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

The absence of hope can rot a society from within.

Tired with all these for restful death I cry, As to behold desert a beggar born, And needy nothing trimmed in jollity, And purest faith unhappily forsworn.

So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear,Farewell remorse: all good to me is lost;Evil,be thou my good.