quotations about pessimism
Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; it reproduces itself by crippling our willingness to act.
HOWARD ZINN
You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train
Pessimism is the product of a hostile social state. Its answer is the substitution of a friendly social state. If this can be done it will disappear.
LESTER FRANK WARD
The Psychic Factors of Civilization
Pessimists are just as illogical as optimists; insomuch as both envisage the aims of mankind as unified, and as having a direct relationship (either of frustration or of fulfilment) to the inevitable flow of terrestrial motivation and events. That is--both schools retain in a vestigial way the primitive concept of a conscious teleology--of a cosmos which gives a damn one way or the other about the especial wants and ultimate welfare of mosquitos, rats, lice, dogs, men, horses, pterodactyls, trees, fungi, dodos, or other forms of biological energy.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to James F. Morton, H. P. Lovecraft: A Life
Only one endowed with restless vitality is susceptible to pessimism. You become a pessimist -- a demonic, elemental, bestial pessimist -- only when life has been defeated many times in its fight against depression. Then destiny emerges in man's consciousness as a form of the irreparable.
E. M. CIORAN
On the Heights of Despair
If I make dark my countenance,
I shut my life from happier chance.
ALFRED TENNYSON
The Two Voices
Pessimism: A valuable protection against quackery.
JOHN RALSTON SAUL
The Doubter's Companion
My pessimism extends to the point of even suspecting the sincerity of other pessimists.
JEAN ROSTAND
Journal of a Character
It takes a fine sense of pessimism to brood with any sort of respectability.
BRANDON SANDERSON
Elantris
It will scarcely be doubted, therefore, that there does exist a real and a very grave danger lest Poetry should, in these perplexing and despondent days, not only be closely associated with Pessimism, but should become for the most part its voice and echo.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus