Cynicism is only intellectual sloth.

 

Cynicism is only intellectual sloth.
--
Riff on life's journey blends humor, hope, Columbus Dispatch

 

Henry Rollins

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Cynicism is intellectual treason.

 

Norman Cousins

 

Cynicism is intellectual dandyism.

 

George Meredith

 

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

 

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

 

Both Nietzsche and Marx did their greatest work seeking to explain the mystery. The term both used was "decadence."
But if there was decadence, what was decaying? Religious faith and moral codes that had been in place since time was, said Nietzsche, who in 1882 made the most famous statement in modern philosophy — "God is dead" — and three startlingly accurate predictions for the twentieth century. He even estimated when they would begin to come true: about 1915. (1) The faith men formerly invested in God they would now invest in barbaric "brotherhoods with the aim of the robbery and exploitation of the non-brothers." Their names turned out, in due course, to be the German Nazis and the Russian Communists. (2) There would be "wars such as have never been waged on earth." Their names turned out to be World War I and World War II. (3) There no longer would be Truth but, rather, "truth" in quotation marks, depending upon which concoction of eternal verities the modem barbarian found most useful at any given moment. The result would be universal skepticism, cynicism, irony, and contempt. The First World War began in 1914 and ended in 1918. On cue, as if Nietzsche were still alive to direct the drama, an entirely new figure, with an entirely new name, arose in Europe: that embodiment of skepticism, cynicism, irony, and contempt, the Intellectual.

 

Friedrich Nietzsche