One's ignorance is one's chief asset.
People told me, 'You talk about Europe like it's Heaven. It's not Heaven.
When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown.
Hope is the denial of reality. It is the carrot dangled before the draft horse to keep him plodding along in a vain attempt to reach it." "Are you saying we shouldn't hope?" "I'm saying we should remove the carrot and walk forward with our eyes open!
Ignorance is bliss as a writer, I think.
When I went into film, it never occurred to me that I wouldn't be able to do whatever I wanted to do. Maybe that was a good thing in the beginning. I had blinders on, and I charged forward.
She knew that what Marianne and her mother conjectured one moment, they believed the next: that with them, to wish was to hope, and to hope was to expect.
There was need of a phantastic, indestructible optimism, and one far removed from all sense of reality, in order, for example, to discover in the shameful death of Christ really the highest salvation and the redemption of the world.
optimism is a disease
Affirmation without discipline is the beginning of delusion.
Hope, for the Christian, is not wishful thinking or mere blind optimism. It is a mode of knowing, a mode within which new things are possible, options are not shut down, new creation can happen.
To be candid, I think, in retrospect, it was a mistake to work at AOL when I did. I think I had rose-colored glasses about the opportunity to reinvent AOL.
How many beginnings before you see the lies in your excitement?
Progress is man’s indifference to the lessons of history.
I don't want to sound like the old guy, but cynicism is a potential danger. It colors our way of looking at the world.
One of the great problems with Americans is that - being a decent people - they assume that everyone else is equally decent.
Aladdin, who said to his wife, I know it's not a lamp, keep rubbing! Never got a dinner!
Believing your own bullshit is always a perilous activity, but never more fatal than for the owner of a start-up venture.
It's human nature to start taking things for granted again when danger isn't banging loudly on the door.
Do we believe that there is equal economic opportunity out there in the real world, right now, for each and every one of these groups? If we believed in the tooth fairy, if we believed in the Easter Bunny, we might well believe that.
Aerodynamically, the bumble bee shouldn't be able to fly, but the bumble bee doesn't know it so it goes on flying anyway.
There is a dangerous optimism of ignorance and indifference.
Optimism," said Cacambo, "What is that?" "Alas!" replied Candide, "It is the obstinacy of maintaining that everything is best when it is worst.
Don't confuse my point of view with cynicism. The real cynics are the ones who tell you that everything's gonna be all right.
Only fools are positive.
