Our enemy really isn't capitalism, it's cynicism. That's one the things I learned from Woody (Guthrie)... Not to be cynical... That cynicism... It destroys you, it rots you away from the inside. So that sense of optimism and humanity... which 20 years ago I would have called socialism but now I'll call compassion... You know, that idea is still out there and alive and if you can plug into that and encourage that it makes it all worth while.
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From Curtis, Hillman, MTIV, Process, Inspiration and Practice for the New Media Designer (Indianapolis: New Riders, 2002), page 221.Billy Bragg
Young people are very cynical now, you know? Very cynical! They've been taught cynicism, they've been — they've been bred cynicism. So, I think it's important to give them hope and realism in the same package, you know? You can be realistic but there should be — there should be hope in it. Because hope's what we're about. If we don't have hope then we don't go on.
Tom Petty
Cynicism isn't smarter, it's only safer. There's nothing fluffy about optimism. ... People have the idea that optimism is fluffy, like you're going to have all these people like walking around in hippy clothing and utopia. No it's very practical. It's just a matter of people being more fulfilled and more whole as human beings.
Jewel (singer)
Parents always live a less pure life than their children, because they condone everything they do. The ability to condone everything in oneself but practically nothing in one's children is the boon that "experience" bestows on humanity. What parents call experience is really nothing but attempts, successful to the point of sheer cynicism, to belie everything which they found pure, true and right when they were young. They themselves don't notice the awful cynicism behind this incessant talk of "experience" being the highest aim in life: they only notice "inexperience" in their children, that is, the form of inexperience called purity and integrity, and then they get annoyed.
Stig Dagerman
…you know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you're cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism.
William Somerset Maugham
Woody Guthrie was what folks who don't believe in anything would call an anomaly. Admittedly, the intersection of space and time at the corner of July 14, 1912, and Okemah, Oklahoma, was a long shot to produce anything like a national treasure.
Woody was born in one of the most desolate places in America, just in time to come of age in the worst period in our history. ... He became the living embodiment of everything a people's revolution is supposed to be about: that working people have dignity, intelligence and value above and beyond the market's demand for their labor. ... For me personally, Woody is my hero of heroes and the only person on earth that I will go to my grave regretting that I never met.Woody Guthrie
Bragg, Billy
Bragg, William Henry
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