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 73 through 108 of 136 quotations in this category.

"Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad."

-Aldous Huxley

"We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins."

-George Bernard Shaw

"That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false."

-Paul Valéry

"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever."

-Napoleon Bonaparte

"In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia."

-George Orwell

"Man no longer dreams over a book in which a soft voice, a constant companion, observes, exhorts, or sighs with him through the pangs of youth and age. Today he is more likely to sit before a screen and dream the mass dream which comes from outside."

-Loren Eiseley

"Although it is a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out, sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation."

-Bertrand Russell

"Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones."

-Bertrand Russell

"Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well."

-Robert Heinlein

"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

"I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: 'The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair.' In these words he epitomized the history of the human race."

-Bertrand Russell

"I always turn to the sports pages first, which records people's accomplishments. The front page has nothing but man's failures."

-Chief Justice Earl Warren

"Science may have found a cure for most evils, but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all -- the apathy of human beings."

-Helen Keller

"While we are postponing, life speeds by."

-Seneca

"Ridicule is generally made use of to laugh men out of virtue and good sense, by attacking everything praiseworthy in human life."

-Joseph Addison

"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

"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

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

-Thomas Hobbes

"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

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

-Edna St. Vincent Millay

"It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets."

-Voltaire

"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

"[Anne Coulter's success] demonstrates the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of a journalistic culture that allows her near a microphone, much less a printing press."

-Eric Alterman

"You think that way as you begin to get grayer and you see pretty plainly that the game is not going to end as you planned."

-Loren Eiseley

"Better make a weak man your enemy than your friend."

-Josh Billings

"The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil."

-Albert Einstein

"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better."

-unknown

"The power of man has grown in every sphere, except over himself."

-Winston Churchill

"If you aren't fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm."

-Vince Lombardi

"The greatest shortage on every beat, in every newsroom in America, is courage."

-Dan Rather, speaking before the Radio-Television News Directors Association in 1993

"Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it."

-Russell Baker

"Hard work has a future payoff. Laziness pays off now."

-unknown

"Wars teach us not to love our enemies, but to hate our allies."

-W. L. George