Pessimists are not boring. Pessimists are right. Pessimists are superfluous.
Criticism and pessimism destroy families, undermine institutions of all kinds, defeat nearly everyone, and spread a shroud of gloom over entire nations.
The bad thing about all religions is that, instead of being able to confess their allegorical nature, they have to conceal it.
Optimism may sometimes be delusional, but pessimism is always delusional.
. . . we should all fortify ourselves against the dark hours of depression by cultivating a deep distrust of the certainties of despair. Despair is relentless in the certainties of its pessimism. But we have seen again and again, from our own experience and others', that absolute statements of hopelessness that we make in the dark are notoriously unreliable. Our dark certainties are not sureties.
Younger people have so many opportunities. I don't see any pessimism among them.
Fear is born in uncertainty and nourished by pessimism.
More than at any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly. I speak, by the way, not with any sense of futility, but with a panicky conviction of the absolute meaninglessness of existence which could easily be misinterpreted as pessimism. It is not. It is merely a healthy concern for the predicament of modern man.
the thing about pessimism is that in most cases it's nothing more than a front behind which a body can hide its most sweetful yet painful hopes. please forgive mine.
Both hope and pessimism are deeply contagious. And no one is more infectious than a leader.
Pessimism is a luxury that a Jew can never allow himself.
Pessimism is an emotion not a philosophy.
Perhaps it's my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things while you still can.
It is one of the consolations of middle aged reformers that the good that they inculcate must live after them if it is to live at all.
I see nothing in the present situation that is either menacing or warrants pessimism.
Pessimism is reactionary because it makes the very idea of improving the world impossible.
My pessimism has never been flabby.
In our time the blasphemies are threadbare. Pessimism is now patently, as it always was essentially, more commonplace than piety. Profanity is now more than an affectation - it is a convention. The curse against God is Exercise I in the primer of minor poetry.
The diseases that we civilized people labor under most are melancholy and pessimism.
Optimism, pessimism, f**k that; we're going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I'm hell-bent on making it work.