 Not all quotations are positive, as below will prove. Quotations in this category offer pessimistic or negative views on a variety of subjects. You may want to try some inspirational quotes after reading through these! Find an updated list of negative quotations at WellOfWisdom.com.
***** "[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 ***** "The existing world economic order constitutes a system of plundering and exploitation like no other in history." -Fidel Castro ***** "There are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots." -??? ***** "You just can't escape the conclusion that half the people you know are below average." -Scaramouche ***** "Scientists in the 19th century postulated that in time, the world would be taken over by morons. My belief is that this actually happened, but we are now too stupid to realise." -Kirruth (from the web) ***** "One disturbing trend is an inverse relationship between wealth (social success) and number of children. Sucessful families having 1.2 children (below the replacement level; their genes are effectively selected against). Poverty-level families having 3.6 children (geneticaly sucessful). We are effectively selecting against being successful." -Alsee (from the web) ***** "Life is tale told by an idiot, full of sound and furry, signifying nothing." -William Shakespeare ***** "In almost every act of our lives whether in the sphere of politics or business in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind." -Edward L. Bernays ***** "Those who manipulate the unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested largely by men we have never heard of." -Edward L. Bernays ***** "We have committed the fatal sin ... of becoming cynical and arrogant with respect to decisions affecting the lives of hundreds of millions of people." -US General Lee Butler, on maintaining a nuclear arsenal ***** "There are no saints, only unrecognized villains." -??? ***** "All our lauded technological progress -- our very civilization - is like the axe in the hand of the pathological criminal." -Albert Einstein ***** "Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts." -Albert Einstein ***** "Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony." -William James ***** "There is so much trouble in coming into the world, and so much more, as well as meanness, in going out of it, that 'tis hardly worth while to be here at all." -Viscount Henry St. John Bolingbroke ***** "The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil." -Albert Einstein Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "The monopoly capitalists - even while employing purely empirical methods - weave around art a complicated web which converts it into a willing tool. The superstructure of society ordains the type of art in which the artist has to be educated. Rebels are subdued by its machinery and only rare talents may create their own work. The rest become shameless hacks or are crushed." -Ernesto "Che" Guevara ***** "What is originality? Undetected plagiarism." -Dean William Ralph Inge ***** "Humanity is composed but of two categories, the invalids and the nurses." -Richard Brinsley Sheridan ***** "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 ***** "Our repentance is not so much regret for the ill we have done as fear of the ill that may happen to us in consequence." -François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld ***** "No human thing is of serious importance." -Plato ***** "The keenest sorrow is to recognize ouselves as the sole cause of all our adversities." -Sophocles ***** "One's real life is often the life that one does not lead." -Oscar Wilde ***** "That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane individual has ever given his assent." -Aldous Leonard Huxley ***** "Better make a weak man your enemy than your friend." -Josh Billings ***** "The most pathetic person in the world is someone who has sight but no vision." -Helen Keller ***** "Nowhere at present is there such a measureless loathing of their country by educated people as in America." -Eric Hoffer ***** "A ruling intelligentsia, whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed, and wasted at will." -Eric Hoffer ***** "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 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 ***** "The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie." -Joseph A. Schempeter Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "Hard work has a future payoff. Laziness pays off now." -??? ***** "Nowhere at present is there such a measureless loathing of their country by educated people as in America." -Eric Hoffer ***** "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 ***** "We compound our suffering by victimizing each other." -Athol Fugard ***** "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 ***** "Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further favors." -Francious de la Rochefoucauld ***** "It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid." -George Bernard Shaw ***** "Learning to dislike children at an early age saves a lot of expense and aggravation later in life." -Robert Byrne ***** "It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it." -Mark Twain ***** "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 ***** "Sleep... Oh! how I loathe those little slices of death...." -Longfellow ***** "No matter how carefully designed and operated a system is, it can still fail grotesquely." -Peter G. Neumann ***** "A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer." -Robert Frost ***** "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 ***** "You can never underestimate the stupidity of the general public." -Scott Adams ***** "A witty saying proves nothing." -Voltaire Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "Like puppets we are moved by outside strings." -Horace ***** "If a choice were given him between suffering death and living his early years over again, who would not shudder and choose death?" -Augustine ***** "It may be that your sole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others." -??? ***** "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 ***** "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 ***** "It is not true that life is one damn thing after another...It's one damn thing over and over." -Edna St. Vincent Millay ***** "Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways." -Stephen Vincent Benét ***** "The life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." -Thomas Hobbes ***** "Wars teach us not to love our enemies, but to hate our allies." -W. L. George ***** "The most merciful thing in the world . . . is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." -H.P. Lovecraft ***** "Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it." -Russell Baker ***** "Politics... have always been the systematic organization of hatreds." -Henry Brooks Adams ***** "Efficiency is intelligent laziness." -David Dunham ***** "Half the world is composed of idiots, the other half of people clever enough to take indecent advantage of them." -Walter Kerr ***** "The power of man has grown in every sphere, except over himself." -Winston Churchill ***** "Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." -??? Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "Fortune knocks but once, but misfortune has much more patience." -Dr. Laurence J. Peter ***** "Life is like a beautiful melody, only the lyrics are messed up." -??? ***** "Many a man's reputation would not know his character if they met on the street." -Elbert Hubbard ***** "What difference does it make how much you have? What you do not have amounts to much more." -Seneca ***** "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 ***** "Ridicule is generally made use of to laugh men out of virtue and good sense, by attacking everything praiseworthy in human life." -Joseph Addison ***** "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 ***** "While we are postponing, life speeds by." -Seneca ***** "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 ***** "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 ***** "Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again." -Andre Gide ***** "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 ***** "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 ***** "A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices." -William James ***** "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 ***** "Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons - that's philosophy." -Aldous Huxley Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "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 ***** "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 ***** "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 ***** "Madness is rare in individuals--but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule." -Friedrich Nietzsche ***** "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 ***** "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 ***** "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 ***** "That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false." -Paul Valéry ***** "Never underestimate the power of human stupidity." -Robert Heinlein ***** "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 ***** "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 ***** "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad." -Aldous Huxley ***** "In art, there are tears that do lie too deep for thought." -Louis Kronenberger ***** "The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable." -H. L. Mencken ***** "Do unto others what has been done to you." -Maynard James Keenan ***** "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 Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "If you don't like yourself, you can't like other people." -Robert Heinlein ***** "There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dullness." -Henry David Thoreau ***** "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 ***** "We live in an age when pizza gets to your home before the police." -Jeff Marder ***** "The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame." -Oscar Wilde ***** "Man has always sacrificed truth to his vanity, comfort and advantage. He lives by makebelieve." -W. Somerset Maugham ***** "Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy." -George Bernard Shaw ***** "Most people would rather die than think; in fact, they do so." -Bertrand Russell ***** "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 ***** "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." -Henry David Thoreau ***** "What do you despise? By this are you truly known." -Frank Herbert ***** "The pious pretense that evil does not exist only makes it vague, enormous and menacing." -Aleister Crowley ***** "It is a most mortifying reflection for a man to consider what he has done, compared to what he might have done. " -Samuel Johnson ***** "Love your enemies just in case your friends turn out to be a bunch of bastards." -R. A. Dickson ***** "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 ***** "Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few." -George Bernard Shaw Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence...on pain of liquidation." -George Bernard Shaw ***** "The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it." -George Bernard Shaw ***** "Youth is a blunder; manhood a struggle; Old Age a regret." -Benjamin Disraeli ***** "If you aren't fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm." -Vince Lombardi ***** "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 ***** "Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." -Napoleon Bonaparte ***** "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 ***** "Suicide is the most sincere form of self-criticism." -??? ***** "Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve." -George Bernard Shaw ***** "Maybe this world is another planet's hell." -Aldous Huxley ***** "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 ***** "America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization." -George Clemenceau ***** "History repeats itself; that's one of the things that's wrong with history." -Clarence Darrow ***** "History is a set of lies agreed upon." -Napoleon Bonaparte ***** "The chief obstacle to the progress of the human race is the human race." -Don Marquis ***** "Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be." -William Hazlitt Click Here to Visit our Sponsor 128 quotes in this category Return to The Quotation Station main page. |