37 Pessimism Quotes

This damned ranting about doom. Is that food for the minds of modern people? Do they really expect us to take them seriously?

I have always been - I think any student of history almost inevitably is - a cheerful pessimist.

For the first time in the history of our country the majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years.

To the question whether I am a pessimist or an optimist, I answer that my knowledge is pessimistic, but my willing and hoping are optimistic.

Cease negative mental chattering. - If you think a thing is impossible, you'll make it impossible. Pessimism blunts the tools you need to succeed.

'One thing leads to another'? Not always. Sometimes one thing leads to the same thing. Ask an addict.

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.

At any innocent tea-table we may easily hear a man say, 'Life is not worth living.' We regard it as we regard the statement that it is a fine day; nobody thinks that it can possibly have any serious effect on the man or on the world. And yet if that utterance were really believed, the world would stand on its head. Murderers would be given medals for saving men from life; firemen would be denounced for keeping men from death; poisons would be used as medicines; doctors would be called in when people were well; the Royal Humane Society would be rooted out like a horde of assassins. Yet we never speculate as to whether the conversational pessimist will strengthen or disorganize society; for we are convinced that theories do not matter.

The Optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds, the Pessimist fears it is true.

Borrow money from pessimists-they don't expect it back.

'Life sucks, and then you die!'

I couldn't survive my own pessimism if I didn't have some kind of sunny little dream. ... Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie - but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That's my utopia. That's what I want for me.

An optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere, while a pessimist sees only the red stoplight... The truly wise person is color-blind.

I once devised a test question which I put to many people to discover whether they were pessimists. The question was: 'If you had the power to destroy the world, would you do so?'

The perversity of the universe tends towards a maximum. The universe is hostile.

'I shouldn't be surprised if it hailed a good deal tomorrow', Eeyore was saying. 'Blizzards and what-not. Being fine today doesn't mean anything. It has no sig - what's that word? Well, it has none of that. It's just a small piece of wheather.'

By what right, moreover, could a Christian or a Marxist accuse me, for example, of pessimism? I was not the one to invent the misery of the human being or the terrifying formulas of divine malediction.

Both optimists and pessimists contribute to society. The optimist invents the airplane, the pessimist invents the parachute.

As we look at these challenges, we must never give in to the belief that America is in decline, or that our culture is doomed to unravel. The American people know better than that. We have proven the pessimists wrong before - and we will do it again.

The pessimist is commonly spoken of as the man in revolt. He is not. Firstly, because it requires some cheerfulness to continue in revolt, and secondly, because pessimism appeals to the weaker side of everybody, and the pessimist, therefore, drives as roaring a trade as the publican. The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives and dies in a desperate and suicidal effort to persuade all the other people how good they are. It has been proved a hundred times over that if you really wish to enrage people and make them angry, even unto death, the right way to do it is to tell them that they are all the sons of God.

Among all creatures that breathe on earth and crawl on it there is not anywhere a thing more dismal than man is.

Realism isn't pessimism. And though the anti-reform interests have won an unconscionable number of battles over the last decade, the war is by no means over.

'Born to Lose, Out to Lunch' - Written on the front of Lemmy's bass.

I returned to civilization shortly after that and went to Cornell to teach, and my first impression was a very strange one. I can't understand it any more, but I felt very strongly then. I sat in a restaurant in New York, for example, and I looked out at the buildings and I began to think, you know, about how much the radius of the Hiroshima bomb damage was and so forth... How far from here was 34th street?... All those buildings, all smashed - and so on. And I would see people building a bridge, or they'd be making a new road, and I thought, they're crazy, they just don't understand, they don't understand. Why are they making new things? It's so useless. But, fortunately, it's been useless for almost forty years now, hasn't it? So I've been wrong about it being useless making bridges and I'm glad those other people had the sense to go ahead.

Life is just a bowl of pits.

The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.

I'm a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.

Were a stranger to drop on a sudden into this world, I would show him, as a specimen of its ills, a hospital full of diseases, a prison crowded with malefactors and debtors, a field of battle strewed with carcasses, a fleet foundering in the ocean, a nation languishing under tyranny, famine, or pestilence. To turn the gay side of life to him, and give him a notion of its pleasures; whither should I conduct him? to a ball, to an opera, to court? He might justly think, that I was only showing him a diversity of distress and sorrow.

I am the last President of the United States!