Quotations: Negative
Not all quotations are positive. Quotations in this category offer pessimistic or negative views on a variety of subjects.
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"All of us who are concerned for peace and triumph of reason and justice must be keenly aware how small an influence reason and honest good will exert upon events in the political field."
-Albert Einstein
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"We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove. We have two opinions: one private, which we are afraid to express; and another one - the one we use - which we force ourselves to wear to please [people], until habit makes us comfortable in it, and the custom of defending it presently makes us love it, adore it, and forget how pitifully we came by it. Look at it in politics."
-Mark Twain
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"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so."
-Douglas Adams
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"We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins of fur and feather so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the devil in human form."
-William Ralph Inge
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"A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices."
-William James
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"The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind."
-H. L. Mencken
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"Do unto others what has been done to you."
-Maynard James Keenan
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"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown."
-H. P. Lovecraft
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"The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame."
-Oscar Wilde
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"It is a most mortifying reflection for a man to consider what he has done, compared to what he might have done. "
-Samuel Johnson
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"Love your enemies just in case your friends turn out to be a bunch of bastards."
-R. A. Dickson
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"Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few."
-George Bernard Shaw
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"We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence...on pain of liquidation."
-George Bernard Shaw
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"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it."
-George Bernard Shaw
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"Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us."
-Calvin
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"Suicide is the most sincere form of self-criticism."
-???
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"Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve."
-George Bernard Shaw
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"America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization."
-George Clemenceau
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"History repeats itself; that's one of the things that's wrong with history."
-Clarence Darrow
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"History is a set of lies agreed upon."
-Napoleon Bonaparte
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"The chief obstacle to the progress of the human race is the human race."
-Don Marquis
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"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
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"It is not true that life is one damn thing after another...It's one damn thing over and over."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
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"The life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
-Thomas Hobbes
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"The most merciful thing in the world . . . is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."
-H.P. Lovecraft
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"Politics... have always been the systematic organization of hatreds."
-Henry Brooks Adams
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"Efficiency is intelligent laziness."
-David Dunham
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"Half the world is composed of idiots, the other half of people clever enough to take indecent advantage of them."
-Walter Kerr
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"Fortune knocks but once, but misfortune has much more patience."
-Dr. Laurence J. Peter
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"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
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"Ridicule is generally made use of to laugh men out of virtue and good sense, by attacking everything praiseworthy in human life."
-Joseph Addison
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"While we are postponing, life speeds by."
-Seneca
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"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
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"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
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"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
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"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
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"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
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"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
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"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
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"That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false."
-Paul Valéry
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"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
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"Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad."
-Aldous Huxley
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"In art, there are tears that do lie too deep for thought."
-Louis Kronenberger
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"If you don't like yourself, you can't like other people."
-Robert Heinlein
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"There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dullness."
-Henry David Thoreau
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"We live in an age when pizza gets to your home before the police."
-Jeff Marder
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"Man has always sacrificed truth to his vanity, comfort and advantage. He lives by makebelieve."
-W. Somerset Maugham
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"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
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"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."
-Henry David Thoreau
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"What do you despise? By this are you truly known."
-Frank Herbert
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"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
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"Youth is a blunder; manhood a struggle; Old Age a regret."
-Benjamin Disraeli
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"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever."
-Napoleon Bonaparte
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"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
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"Wars teach us not to love our enemies, but to hate our allies."
-W. L. George
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"Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it."
-Russell Baker
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"The power of man has grown in every sphere, except over himself."
-Winston Churchill
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"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better."
-???
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"What difference does it make how much you have? What you do not have amounts to much more."
-Seneca
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"If we slide into one of those rare moments of military honesty, we realize that the technical demands of modern warfare are so complex a considerable percentage of our material is bound to malfunction even before it is deployed against a foe. We no longer waste manpower by carrying the flag into battle. Instead we need battalions of electronic engineers to keep the terrible machinery grinding."
-Ernest K. Gann
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"Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again."
-Andre Gide
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"Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons - that's philosophy."
-Aldous Huxley
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"Madness is rare in individuals--but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule."
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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"Never underestimate the power of human stupidity."
-Robert Heinlein
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"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
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"Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy."
-George Bernard Shaw
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"Most people would rather die than think; in fact, they do so."
-Bertrand Russell
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"The pious pretense that evil does not exist only makes it vague, enormous and menacing."
-Aleister Crowley
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"If you aren't fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm."
-Vince Lombardi
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"Maybe this world is another planet's hell."
-Aldous Huxley
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"Life is like a beautiful melody, only the lyrics are messed up."
-???
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"Many a man's reputation would not know his character if they met on the street."
-Elbert Hubbard
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"All that I care to know is that a man is a human being - that is enough for me; he can't be any worse."
-Mark Twain
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"Man is the sole animal whose nudities offend his own companions, and the only one who, in his natural actions, withdraws and hides himself from his own kind."
-Montaigne
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"The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable."
-H. L. Mencken
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