Negative Quotations

Not all quotations are positive, as this category proves. These will offer only pessimistic or negative views on a variety of subjects.

Showing 37 through 72 of 141 quotations in this category.

"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

"What do you despise? By this are you truly known."

-Frank Herbert

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."

-Henry David Thoreau

"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

"Man has always sacrificed truth to his vanity, comfort and advantage. He lives by makebelieve."

-W. Somerset Maugham

"We live in an age when pizza gets to your home before the police."

-Jeff Marder

"There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dullness."

-Henry David Thoreau

"If you don't like yourself, you can't like other people."

-Robert Heinlein

"In art, there are tears that do lie too deep for thought."

-Louis Kronenberger

"Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad."

-Aldous Huxley

"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

"That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false."

-Paul Valéry

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"While we are postponing, life speeds by."

-Seneca

"Ridicule is generally made use of to laugh men out of virtue and good sense, by attacking everything praiseworthy in human life."

-Joseph Addison

"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

"Fortune knocks but once, but misfortune has much more patience."

-Dr. Laurence J. Peter

"Half the world is composed of idiots, the other half of people clever enough to take indecent advantage of them."

-Walter Kerr

"Politics... have always been the systematic organization of hatreds."

-Henry Brooks Adams

"The most merciful thing in the world . . . is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."

-H.P. Lovecraft

"The life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

-Thomas Hobbes

"It is not true that life is one damn thing after another...It's one damn thing over and over."

-Edna St. Vincent Millay

"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

"If a choice were given him between suffering death and living his early years over again, who would not shudder and choose death?"

-Augustine

"You can never underestimate the stupidity of the general public."

-Scott Adams

"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

"A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer."

-Robert Frost

"Sleep... Oh! how I loathe those little slices of death...."

-Longfellow

"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

"Learning to dislike children at an early age saves a lot of expense and aggravation later in life."

-Robert Byrne