The Cold War was waged in a particularly brutal and cynical way in Africa, and Africa seemed powerless to do anything to stop it.
Cynical is a fool's word for realist.
There is no other genre that deals with America better, in a subtextual way, than the Westerns being made in the different decades. The '50s Westerns very much put forth an Eisenhower idea of America, whereas the Westerns of the '70s were very cynical about America.
A woman tries to get all she can out of a man, and a man tries to get all he can into a woman.
The radicals. . . want speech regulated by codes that proscribe certain language. They see free speech as at best a delusion, at worst a threat to the welfare of minorities and women. . . . The most obvious (and cynical) explanation for the switched positions is the switched situations. Protesting students became established professors and administrators. For outsiders, free speech is bread and butter; for insiders, indigestion. To the new academics, unregulated free speech spells trouble.
Bush promised a foreign policy of humility and a domestic policy of compassion. He has given us a foreign policy of arrogance and a domestic policy that is cynical, myopic and cruel.
The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists - that is why they invented hell.
You know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you're cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism.
Making love in the morning got me through morning sickness. I found I could be happy and throw up at the same time.
Seeing ourselves as others see us would probably confirm our worst suspicions about them.
Whatever politicians, activists and manipulators propose, it is the phlegmatic, indifferent, ingrained electorate which disposes.
The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
A well governed people are generally a people who do not think much.
I try and find and access the parts of myself that still blindly believe and have faith in a lot of things. I don't mean to be cynical, but I've also discovered that I still have a lot of those. And they may not be where I expected them to be. Maybe I've been in relationships, and this is a movie about relationships, like romance relationships - so maybe I've been in some that have sort of made me lose my faith. But deep down inside, I still have blind faith.
We muckraked, not because we hated our world, but because we loved it. We were not hopeless, we were not cynical, we were not bitter.
A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes.
The Iranian government prevented journalists from marching in solidarity with the victims of the Charlie Hebdo massacre yet it organized flag-burning protests against the French embassy, that hasn't ingratiated them to a French nuclear negotiating team that is deeply cynical about the nature of the Iranian regime.
It's so sweet, I feel like my teeth are rotting when I listen to the radio.
You may be sure that when a man begins to call himself a realist he is preparing to do something that he is secretly ashamed of doing.
I think that Goldman Sachs and the Pentagon determine more of America's outcome then any president or any congress, that sounds a bit cynical, but I think I am right.