cynic Quotes

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

I don't consider myself a cynic. I think of myself as a skeptic and a realist.

Scratch any cynic and you will find a disappointed idealist.

Someone once said a cynic is just a disappointed romantic. That really, really sums me up.

A beardless cynic is the shame of nature.

Idealist: a cynic in the making.

… the cynic has unusually high motives or insight. He is better able to see behind false appearances, and he is more shocked and disappointed to discover the low motives of others. Because he is unwilling to be hypocritical, he is less popular and so he succeeds and leads less. Most people dislike cynics because cynics expose most people's hypocrisy.

Never trust anyone who has no doubts. And I'm not talking about scepticism either: scepticism can be a healthy thing. You can have an argument with someone who's a sceptic. When I say 'cynic', I mean someone who has given up, and they want you to give up too, so it makes them feel better about themselves.

I'm a total pessimist.

A politician or political thinker who calls himself a political realist is usually boasting that he sees politics, so to speak, in the raw; he is generally a proclaimed cynic and pessimist who makes it his business to look behind words and fine speeches for the motive. This motive is always low.

the cynic is a coward. He foresees all barrenness so that barrenness can never surprise him.

There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.

[Christianity] neither enjoins the nastiness of the Cynic, nor the insensibility of the Stoic.

Remember, beneath every cynic there lies a romantic, and probably an injured one.

critic, n. A person who boasts himself hard to please because nobody tries to please him.

You're such a cynic," Molly said. "I think cynics are playful and cute.

A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.

Cynic' is the sentimentalist's name for the realist.

I'm a cynic about corporate democracy and boards.

At 50, a man can be an ass without being an optimist but not an optimist without being an ass

No man ever raised a monument to a cynic or wrote a poem about a man without faith.

A cynic should never marry an idealist. For the cynic, marriage represents the welcome end of romantic life, with all its agony and ecstasy. But for the idealist, it is only the beginning.

A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past; he is one who is prematurely disappointed in the future.

I'm an old cynic.

The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer.