115 Cynicism Quotes To Ponder

Cynicism, often perceived as a skeptical view of human nature and motives, has intrigued thinkers, philosophers, and writers for centuries. It offers a lens through which we can critically examine society and our interactions within it. In the following collection, we've gathered 115 of the most thought-provoking cynicism quotes. These quotes will challenge your perceptions, perhaps even amuse you, and certainly give you plenty to ponder about the complexities and contradictions of the human experience. Dive in and explore these words of wisdom that resonate with a sentiment as timeless as it is profound.

1. “A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.” - Oscar Wilde

2. “All I have to be thankful for in this world is that I was sitting down when my garter busted.” - Dorothy Parker

3. “I'm not ready to let the youthful part of myself go yet. If maturity means becoming a cynic, if you have to kill the part of yourself that is naive and romantic and idealistic - the part of you that you treasure most - to claim maturity, is it not better to die young but with your humanity intact?” - Kenneth Cain

4. “As my father always used to tell me, 'You see, son, there's always someone in the world worse off than you.' And I always used to think, 'So?” - Bill Bryson

5. “Every ounce of my cynicism is supported by historical precedent.” - Glen Cook

6. “If there was anything that depressed him more than his own cynicism, it was that quite often it still wasn't as cynical as real life.” - Terry Pratchett

7. “Cynic, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are not as they ought to be.” - Ambrose Bierce

8. “By the time you swear you're his,Shivering and sighing.And he vows his passion is,Infinite, undying.Lady make note of this --One of you is lying.” - Dorothy Parker

9. “You're such an optimist Kane -- that's your problem. You only end up disappointed.” - Paul Grist

10. “Life is serious but art is fun!” - John Irving

11. “Cynicism is not realistic and tough. It's unrealistic and kind of cowardly because it means you don't have to try. ---in Good Housekeeping” - Peggy Noonan

12. “I spit on your happiness! I spit on your idea of life--that life that must go on, come what may. You are all like dogs that lick everything they smell. You with your promise of a humdrum happiness--provided a person doesn't ask much of life. I want everything of life, I do; and I want it now! I want it total, complete: otherwise I reject it! I will not be moderate. I will not be satisfied with the bit of cake you offer me if I promise to be a good little girl. I want to be sure of everything this very day; sure that everything will be as beautiful as when I was a little girl. If not, I want to die!” - Jean Anouilh

13. “If you behaved nicely, the communists wouldn't exist.” - Jenny Holzer

14. “No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up.” - Lily Tomlin

15. “Scratch any cynic and you will find a disappointed idealist.” - George Carlin

16. “Remember, you cannot be both young and wise. Young people who pretend to be wise to the ways of the world are mostly just cynics. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us. Cynics always say no. But saying “yes” begins things. Saying “yes” is how things grow. Saying “yes” leads to knowledge. “Yes” is for young people. So for as long as you have the strength to, say “yes'.” - Stephen Colbert

17. “Lying is an indispensable part of making life tolerable.” - Bergen Evans

18. “A true friend is a gift from God. Since God doesn't exist, guess what? Neither do true friends.” - Scott Dikkers

19. “The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.” - Tom Waits

20. “Too much faith is the worst ally. When you believe in something literally, through your faith you'll turn it into something absurd. One who is a genuine adherent, if you like, of some political outlook, never takes its sophistries seriously, but only its practical aims, which are concealed beneath these sophistries. Political rhetoric and sophistries do not exist, after all, in order that they be believed; rather, they have to serve as a common and agreed upon alibi. Foolish people who take them in earnest sooner or later discover inconsistencies in them, begin to protest, and finish finally and infamously as heretics and apostates. No, too much faith never brings anything good...” - Milan Kundera

21. “In Paris, where raillery is so quick to throw emotion out the window, silence, in a roomful of clever people after a story, is the most flattering of all marks of success” - Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

22. “That's what I've never been able to get about religion: that charmless combination of altruism and insanity. Give me a cynical, self-interested bastard any day of the week; at least you can play chicken with him and know he'll stick to the rules.” - Mike Carey

23. “One simple answer is that there has been a massive rise in the incidence of sanctimony and smugness among the successful that has nothing to do with any change in the underlying reality. Rather, it has been stimulated by politicians who have realized that it is possible to win power by recruiting the most economically successful forty per cent or so of the population in a crusade to roll back the gains made by their fellow citizens in the previous forty years. And how better to rationalize this than to tell people that they deserve the incomes that the market generates?” - Brian Barry

24. “Nobody is driven by abstractions like 'seeking truth.” - Michael Crichton

25. “The real inferiority of women to men is shown by their hate of paederasty, which they regard as unfair competition. Men on the other hand rather approve of Sapphism, as saving them trouble & expense.—Aleister Crowley. 1929-03-09 diary entry.” - Lawrence Sutin

26. “I fight cynicism. It`s too easy. It`s really boring. It`s much harder to be positive and see the wonder of everything. Cynicism is a bunch of people who aren`t as talented as other people, knocking them because they make them feel even more untalented.” - Ewan McGregor

27. “What were you like," I asked her. "we're you happy? Or were you smiling because they told you to?” - Gabrielle Zevin

28. “All I ask is one thing, and I’m asking this particularly of young people: please don’t be cynical. I hate cynicism, for the record, it’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.” - Conan O'Brien

29. “Ignorance is king. Many would not profit by his abdication. Many enrich themselves by means of his dark monarchy. They are his Court, and in his name they defraud and govern, enrich themselves and perpetuate their power. Even literacy they fear, for the written word is another channel of communication that might cause their enemies to become united. Their weapons are keen-honed, and they use them with skill. They will press the battle upon the world when their interests are threatened, and the violence which follows will last until the structure of society as it now exists is leveled to rubble, and a new society emerges. I am sorry. But that is how I see it.” - Walter M. Miller Jr.

30. “Cynicism, like gullibility, is a symptom of underdeveloped critical faculties.” - Jamie Whyte

31. “Amory: I love you.Rosalind: I love you- now.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

32. “Loving humanity means as much, and as little, as loving raindrops, or loving the Milky Way. You say that you love humanity? Are you sure you aren’t treating yourself to easy self-congratulation, seeking approval, making certain you’re on the right side?” - Julian Barnes

33. “In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.” - Sigmund Freud

34. “The atmosphere was electrified by the orgasm with which the strong and secure are overcome when confronted with the visible frailty of someone worse off than themselves.” - Paul Leppin

35. “motivating people, forcing them to your will, gives you a cynical attitude toward humanity. It degrades everything it touches.” - Frank Herbert

36. “There is nothing more important than appearing to be religious.” - Niccolo Machiavelli

37. “Cynicism is when a small mind and a hurt heart rejects the hope, love, and truth of a big and caring God.” - Jayce O'Neal

38. “Cynicism places the cynic at the center seat of judgement with the self appointed authority to criticize and condemn. ” - Jayce O'Neal

39. “You're such a cynic," Molly said."I think cynics are playful and cute.” - Jim Butcher

40. “The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.” - John Updike

41. “Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us.” - Stephen Colbert

42. “...God created the world in six days. On the seventh day, he rested. On the eighth day, he started getting complaints. And it hasn't stopped since.” - James Scott Bell

43. “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not money, I am become as a sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not money, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not money, it profiteth me nothing. Money suffereth long, and is kind; money envieth not; money vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. . . . And now abideth faith, hope, money, these three; but the greatest of these is money. I Corinthians xiii (adapted) ” - George Orwell

44. “Cynicism was a one-way path, and once taken the way back was lost forever.” - Chris Wooding

45. “Gold was not sure of many things, but he was definite about one: for every successful person he knew, he could name at least two others of greater ability, better, and higher intelligence who, by comparison, had failed.” - Joseph Heller

46. “A politician is a politician whether he's wearing a suit or a funny hat.” - Reza Aslan

47. “Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse” - Joseph Brodsky

48. “Uncouth, clannish, lumbering about the confines of Space and Time with a puzzled expression on his face and a handful of things scavenged on the way from gutters, interglacial littorals, sacked settlements and broken relationships, the Earth-human has no use for thinking except in the service of acquisition. He stands at every gate with one hand held out and the other behind his back, inventing reasons why he should be let in. From the first bunch of bananas, his every sluggish fit or dull fleabite of mental activity has prompted more, more; and his time has been spent for thousands of years in the construction and sophistication of systems of ideas that will enable him to excuse, rationalize, and moralize the grasping hand.His dreams, those priceless comic visions he has of himself as a being with concerns beyond the material, are no more than furtive cannibals stumbling round in an uncomfortable murk of emotion, trying to eat each other. Politics, religion, ideology — desperate, edgy attempts to shift the onus of responsibility for his own actions: abdications. His hands have the largest neural representation in the somesthetic cortex, his head the smallest; but he's always trying to hide the one behind the other.” - M. John Harrison

49. “Si la cursilería fuera un pecado, yo cada noche me ganaría el infierno.” - Xavier Velasco

50. “You know, the Philistines have long since discarded the rack and stake as a means of suppressing the opinions they feared: they've discovered a much more deadly weapon of destruction -- the wisecrack.” - W. Somerset Maugham

51. “Scratch the surface of most cynics and you find a frustrated idealist — someone who made the mistake of converting his ideals into expectations.” - Peter Senge

52. “Jake was close to tears. In that moment he saw the world in its true light, as a place where nothing had ever been any good and nothing of significance done: no art worth a second look, no philosophy of the slightest appositeness, no law but served the state, no history that gave an inkling of how it had been and what had happened. And no love, only egotism, infatuation and lust.” - Kingsley Amis

53. “I'm getting old, thought Eileen Calder. Old and worn out and cynical. And being cynical is a lot worse than being old or worn out.” - Charles Sheffield

54. “Sometimes I think books are the only friends worth having.” - Susie Derkins

55. “If cynicism and love lie at opposite ends of a spectrum, do we not sometimes fall in love in order to escape the debilitating cynicism to which we are prone? Is there not in every coup de foudre a certain willful exaggeration of the qualities of the beloved, an exaggeration which distracts us from our habitual pessimism and focuses our energies on someone in whom we can believe in a way we have never believed in ourselves?” - Alain De Botton

56. “But with man the case is otherwise, in that when logic leads to any humiliating conclusion, the sole effect is to discredit logic.” - James Branch Cabell

57. “He found that it was easy to make a heroic gesture, but hard to abide by its results.” - W. Somerset Maugham

58. “Life is not an easy matter…. You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.” - Leon Trotsky

59. “To be cynical is to be distant. While offering a false intimacy of being "in the know," cynicism actually destroys intimacy. It leads to a creeping bitterness that can deaden and even destroy the spirit...A praying life is just the opposite. It engaged evil. It doesn't take no for an answer. The psalmist was in God's face, hoping, dreaming, asking. Prayer is feisty. Cynicism, on the other hand, merely critiques. It is passive, cocooning itself from the passions of the great cosmic battle we are engaged in. It is without hope.” - Paul E. Miller

60. “[T]he enduring problem for liberals, as for everyone else, is not whether history will judge them wise or foolish regarding the war on terrorism; it is, rather, the way that the past decade has splintered them away from other Americans. This fracture comes with a steep price: in today's toxic atmosphere, liberals are no less cynical, shortsighted, and parochial than anyone else, and they understand their fellow-Americans just as badly as they themselves are understood. When liberals look at red-state voters, they see either a mob of pious know-nothings or the insensible victims of militarism and class warfare. Yet.... [such people] defy fixed categories, which means that they have to be figured out the hard way--on their own terms.” - George Packer

61. “Rich men have dreams. Poor men die to make them come true.” - Glen Cook

62. “A refusal of praise is a desire to be praised twice.” - Francois de La Rochefoucauld

63. “He see's the world the way cynics do; Not looking for false Hope.” - Meredith Duran

64. “I think cynicism is more enduring than sentimentality.” - Alexander Payne

65. “It all depends on what people you're talking about helping. That's the wonderful think about just about every religion on the planet - they're all so incredibly selfish.” - Derek Landy

66. “It is a well-known fact that very often, putting the period of boyhood out of the argument, the older we grow the more cynical and hardened we become; indeed, many of us are only saved by timely death from moral petrification, if not from moral corruption.” - H. Rider Haggard

67. “Better not to find out whether or not the rumorsare true, I say. Better find the other bastard and skinhim.” - Angelo Tsanatelis

68. “On revient toujours a son premier amour." It sounds like a cynicism to-day. As if we really meant: "On ne revient jamais a son premier amour." But as a matter of fact, a man never leaves his first love, once the love is established. He may leave his first attempt at love. Once a man establishes a full dynamic communication at the deeper and higher centers, with a woman, this can never be broken. But sex in the head breaks down, and half circuits break down. Once the full circuit is established, however, this can never break.” - D.H. Lawrence

69. “Maybe it's the fact the most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip - and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It's more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendant horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we've hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it's stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naivete.” - David Foster Wallace

70. “The fucking world is running out of gas.” - John Updike

71. “My lord, will you be true?Who, I? Alas, it is my vice, my fault:Whiles others fish with craft for great opinion,I with great truth catch mere simplicity;Whilst some with cunning gild their copper crowns,With truth and plainness I do wear mine bare.Fear not my truth: the moral of my witIs "plain and true"; there's all the reach of it.” - William Shakespeare

72. “She (historian Barbara Tuchman) draws on skepticism, not cynicism, leaving the reader not so much outraged by human ability as amused and saddened by human folly.” - Robert K. Massie

73. “It's weird, marriage. It's like this license that gives a person the legal right to control their spouse / their 'other half.” - Jess C. Scott

74. “I am a citizen of the world.” - Diogenes of Sinope

75. “It is not that I am mad, it is only that my head is different from yours.” - Diogenes of Sinope

76. “Poverty is a virtue which one can teach oneself.” - Diogenes of Sinope

77. “I find that the critics of voluntary service are all too often those who are prepared to accept such services when they require them but deride them with cynicism and scepticism when they see others helping and being helped.” - Eva Hart

78. “To sum it all up, the [Ayn] Rand belief system looks like this:1. Facts are facts: things can be absolutely right or absolutely wrong, as determined by reason.2. According to my reasoning, I am absolutely right.3. Charity is immoral.4. Pay for your own fucking schools.” - Matt Taibbi

79. “Stir not the bitterness in the cup that I mixed for myself,' said Denethor. 'Have I not tasted it now many nights upon my tongue, foreboding that worse lay in the dregs?” - J.R.R. Tolkien

80. “A true rationalist ought to be effective in the real world.” - Eliezer Yudkowsky

81. “I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are good people and bad people. You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.” - Terry Pratchett

82. “But I was naturally suspicious; it comes from working too closely with the police for too long. Cynicism is so contagious.” - Laurell K. Hamilton

83. “Haven’t you heard of privacy, or were you raised by a tribe of hedonistic Vikings?” - Wade Kelly

84. “Someone told me I’m a cynical fatalist but I prefer the term realist.” - Wade Kelly

85. “That's the hardest thing of all--never to become cynical, never to lose faith, never to become indifferent.” - Sergei Lukyanenko

86. “I hate the world. Everything comes into it so clean and goes out so dirty. (from COVER CHARGE - currently not listed)” - Cornell Woolrich

87. “If grass grows and withers, it can only mean that it is part of a greater thing, which is even more real; not that the grass is less real than it looks. St. Thomas (Aquinas) has a really logical right to say, in the words of the modern mystic, A. E.: "I begin by the grass to be bound again to the Lord.” - G.K. Chesterton

88. “Ce sper eu e sa fac de ras lumea literara. Sa rad pe cat pot de netrebnicii astia lingusitori, adunati ca intr-un musuroi, care se pupa-n fund unul pe altul si isi ling ranile in timp ce, de fapt, isi pun bete roate reciproc.” - Haruki Murakami

89. “Home? What is home? Home is where a house is that you come back to when the rainy season is about to begin, to wait until the next dry season comes around. Home is where your woman is, that you come back to in the intervals between a greater love - the only real love - the lust for riches buried in the earth, that are your own if you can find them. Perhaps you do not call it home, even to yourself. Perhaps you call them 'my house,' 'my woman,' What if there was another 'my house,' 'my woman,' before this one? It makes no difference. This woman is enough for now.Perhaps the guns sounded too loud at Anzio or at Omaha Beach, at Guadalcanal or at Okinawa. Perhaps when they stilled again some kind of strength had been blasted from you that other men still have. And then again perhaps it was some kind of weakness that other men still have. What is strength, what is weakness, what is loyalty, what is perfidy?The guns taught only one thing, but they taught it well: of what consequence is life? Of what consequence is a man? And, therefore, of what consequence if he tramples love in one place and goes to find it in the next? The little moment that he has, let him be at peace, far from the guns and all that remind him of them.So the man who once was Bill Taylor has come back to his house, in the dusk, in the mountains, in Anahuac. ("The Moon Of Montezuma")” - Cornell Woolrich

90. “Cynicism is often the shamefaced product of inexperience.” - A.J. Liebling

91. “And you that sought for magic in your youth but desire it not in your age, know that there is a blindness of spirit which comes from age, more black than the blindness of eye, making a darkness about you across which nothing may be seen, or felt, or known, or in any way apprehended.” - Lord Dunsany

92. “I think cynicism often disguises itself as humour.” - Michka Assayas

93. “Indulge me, John. Cynicism and foul language are the only vices I'm presently capable of. Everything else takes energy or money.” - Mary Doria Russell

94. “The public is always relieved to find that once the chief officers of state are elected they do not sincerely want change.” - Gore Vidal

95. “Humans are moving into a new phase, one based on the knowledge that talking about their feelings has never got them anywhere.” - Glen Duncan

96. “Wish in one hand, shit in the other, see which one fills up faster.” - Noelle Oxenhandler

97. “Humanity is a monster you can never kill.” - Kameron Hurley

98. “I lost something magical in the process of growing up – my disillusionment.” - Bauvard

99. “There was something in her eyes that made me trust her. Maybe it was because they held the same cynicism, the same world-weariness I saw in my own every morning when I looked at myself in the mirror.” - Melika Dannese Lux

100. “Cynicism makes you feel smart, I know it, even when you aren't smart.” - Richard Ford

101. “A thousand years from now nobody is going to know that you or I ever lived. The cynic is right, but lazy. He says ‘You live, you die and nothing you do will ever make a difference.’ But as long as I live, I’m going to be like Beethoven and shake my fist at fate and try to do something for those who live here now and who knows how far into the future that will go. If I accomplish nothing more than making my arm sore, at least I will be satisfied that I have lived.” - Jackson Burnett

102. “It's when the 'international community' expresses 'concern' about your 'situation' that your situation is well and truly fucked.” - Michael D. Weiss

103. “Obviously, there’s no way of making money that doesn’t hurt somebody somewhere, but there are degrees of scale and immediacy. A merchant prince or a banker or a wealthy landowner isn’t generally required to take responsibility for the people he cheats, screws and starves; society couldn’t function if that were the case.” - K.J. Parker

104. “We are all cynics now, I suppose, and even a mewling infant knows that to save a life is to make an eternal enemy.” - Paul Hoffman

105. “It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little.” - Diogenes of Sinope

106. “Everyone else felt the need to assure me that Mother's death was part of God's plan. Exactly, I wanted to shout after reading this sentiment half a dozen times--- his plan is to kill us all, and if an innocent child dies in agony and a wicked man breathes his last at an advanced age in his sleep, who are we to call it injustice?” - Valerie Martin

107. “This is some sort of joke, isn't it?" asks Hunt, staring at the flawless blue sky and distant fields.I cough as lightly and briefly as possible into a handkerchief I have made from a towel borrowed from the inn. "Probably," I say. "But then, what isn't?” - Dan Simmons

108. “We shall, as we ripen in grace, have greater sweetness towards our fellow Christians. Bitter-spirited Christians may know a great deal, but they are immature. Those who are quick to censure may be very acute in judgment, but they are as yet very immature in heart. He who grows in grace remembers that he is but dust, and he therefore does not expect his fellow Christians to be anything more; he overlooks ten thousand of their faults, because he knows his God overlooks twenty thousand in his own case. He does not expect perfection in the creature, and, therefore, he is not disappointed when he does not find it. ... I know we who are young beginners in grace think ourselves qualified to reform the whole Christian church. We drag her before us, and condemn her straightway; but when our virtues become more mature, I trust we shall not be more tolerant of evil, but we shall be more tolerant of infirmity, more hopeful for the people of God, and certainly less arrogant in our criticisms.” - Charles H. Spurgeon

109. “Dantes had entered the Chateau d’If with the round, open, smiling face of a young and happy man, with whom the earlypaths of life have been smooth. and who anticipates a future corresponding with his past. This was now all changed. The oval face was lengthened, his smiling mouth had assumed the firm and markedlines which betoken resolution; his eyebrows were arched beneath a brow furrowed with thought; his eyes were full of melancholy, and from their depths occasionally sparkled gloomy fires of misanthropy and hatred; his complexion, so long kept from the sun, had now that pale color which produces, when the features are encircled with black hair, the aristocratic beauty of the man of the north; the profound learning he had acquired had besides diffused over his features a refined intellectual expression; and he had also acquired, being naturally of a goodly stature, that vigor which a frame possesses which has so long concentrated all its force within itself.” - Alexandre Dumas

110. “Maybe your empathy's just a comforting lie, you ever think of that? Maybe you think you know how the other person feels but you're only feeling yourself, maybe you're even worse than me. Or maybe we're all just guessing.” - Peter Watts

111. “I am discovering that I can live far better without cynicism than I can without trust.” - Steve Goodier

112. “Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths?” - Edith Wharton

113. “If this was cynical, then we must allow that all courtship is cynical.” - Zoe Heller

114. “Cynicism is one of the terrible obstacles to progress.” - Bryant McGill

115. “The dark war consciousness and pride have seized upon the weak, with great cynicisms and glib, soulless intellects, that grind away like robotic gears at what they despise and can never understand.” - Bryant McGill