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Pasteboard pies and paper flowers are being banished from the stage by the growth of that power of accurate observation which is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it…
--
The World (18 July 1894), Music in London 1890-1894 being criticisms contributed week by week to The World (New York: Vienna House, 1973).

 

George Bernard Shaw

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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.

 

Billy Bragg

 

Kin Hubbard is dead. To us folks that attempt to write a little humor his death is just like Edison's would be to the world of invention. No man in our generation was within a mile of him, and I am so glad that I didn't wait for him to go to send flowers. I have said it from the stage and in print for twenty years. Just think — only two lines a day, yet he expressed more original philosophy in 'em than all the rest of the paper combined. What a kick Twain and all that gang will get out of Kin.

 

Kin (Frank McKinney Hubbard) Hubbard

 

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind; how the observation of last year seems childish, superficial; how this year — even this week — even with this new phrase — it seems to us that we have grown to a new maturity. It may be a fallacious persuasion, but at least it is stimulating, and so long as it persists, one does not stagnate.
I look back as through a telescope, and see, in the little bright circle of the glass, moving flocks and ruined cities.

 

Vita Sackville-West

 

The 20th century has been characterised by three developments of great political importance. The growth of democracy; the growth of corporate power; and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.

 

Alex Carey

 

I had imagined that the prelates of the Galilaeans were under greater obligations to me than to my predecessor. For in his reign many of them were banished, persecuted, and imprisoned, and many of the so-called heretics were executed ... all of this has been reversed in my reign; the banished are allowed to return, and confiscated goods have been returned to the owners. But such is their folly and madness that, just because they can no longer be despots, ... or carry out their designs first against their brethren, and then against us, the worshippers of the gods, they are inflamed with fury and stop at nothing in their unprincipled attempts to alarm and enrage the people.

 

Julian (Emperor)