Negative Quotations

Not all quotations are positive, as this category proves. These will offer only pessimistic or negative views on a variety of subjects.

Showing 37 through 72 of 137 quotations in this category.

"What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war. Petrol is much more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict."

-Simone Weil

"Youth is a blunder; manhood a struggle; Old Age a regret."

-Benjamin Disraeli

"Think about how stupid the average person is, then realize that half of us are stupider than that."

-George Carlin

"One's real life is often the life that one does not lead."

-Oscar Wilde

"Fortune knocks but once, but misfortune has much more patience."

-Dr. Laurence J. Peter

"Half the world is composed of idiots, the other half of people clever enough to take indecent advantage of them."

-Walter Kerr

"Politics... have always been the systematic organization of hatreds."

-Henry Brooks Adams

"The most merciful thing in the world . . . is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."

-H.P. Lovecraft

"Chess is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever when they are only wasting their time."

-George Bernard Shaw

"The life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

-Thomas Hobbes

"It is not true that life is one damn thing after another...It's one damn thing over and over."

-Edna St. Vincent Millay

"Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting."

-George Orwell

"If a choice were given him between suffering death and living his early years over again, who would not shudder and choose death?"

-Augustine

"You can never underestimate the stupidity of the general public."

-Scott Adams

"All the problems of the world could be settled if people were only willing to think. The trouble is that people very often resort to all sorts of devices in order not to think, because thinking is such hard work."

-Thomas J. Watson

"A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer."

-Robert Frost

"Sleep... Oh! how I loathe those little slices of death...."

-Longfellow

"It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled sea of thought."

-John Kenneth Galbraith

"Learning to dislike children at an early age saves a lot of expense and aggravation later in life."

-Robert Byrne

"Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise."

-George Orwell

"Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further favors."

-Francious de la Rochefoucauld

"The American Way Of Life™ has destroyed our individuality while pretending to cater to it, and the natural interdependence of society has been compromised by the...media and the cubicle farms they call workplaces."

-Srini Kumar, unamerican.com

"The quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass movement leadership. What counts is the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the singlehanded defiance of the world."

-Eric Hoffer

"Nowhere at present is there such a measureless loathing of their country by educated people as in America."

-Eric Hoffer

"What do you despise? By this are you truly known."

-Frank Herbert

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."

-Henry David Thoreau

"There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement. For an achievement does not settle anything permanently. We still have to prove our worth anew each day: we have to prove that we are as good today as we were yesterday. But when we have a valid alibi for not achieving anything we are fixed, so to speak, for life."

-Eric Hoffer

"The most pathetic person in the world is someone who has sight but no vision."

-Helen Keller

"No one feels another's grief, no one understands another's joy. People imagine that they can reach one another. In reality they only pass each other by."

-Franz Schubert

"That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane individual has ever given his assent."

-Aldous Leonard Huxley

"Politics has become a game of meaningless, mindless battles, conducted by unscrupulous methods and people, designed to transform even the most serious policy debates into sport."

-Al Gore, May 2006

"The keenest sorrow is to recognize ouselves as the sole cause of all our adversities."

-Sophocles

"The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the ocean searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain any more, so it eats it. It's rather like getting tenure."

-Michael Scriven

"A man with a career can have no time to waste upon his wife and friends; he has to devote it wholly to his enemies."

-John Oliver Hobbes

"Humanity is composed but of two categories, the invalids and the nurses."

-Richard Brinsley Sheridan

"What is originality? Undetected plagiarism."

-Dean William Ralph Inge