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What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.
-Roland Barthes
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The cynic is one who never sees a good quality in a man, and never fails to see a bad one. He is the human owl, vigilant in darkness and blind to light, mousing for vermin, and never seeing noble game.
-Henry Ward Beecher
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A cynic is a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, and not as they ought to be.
-Ambrose Bierce
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Fools are my theme, let satire be my song.
-Lord (George Gordon) Byron
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The satirist is prevented by repulsion from gaining a better knowledge of the world he is attracted to, yet he is forced by attraction to concern himself with the world that repels him.
-Italo Calvino
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Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the devil; for which reason I have long since as good as renounced it.
-Thomas Carlyle
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I'm a hopeful cynic.
-Tracy Chapman
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What arouses the indignation of the honest satirist is not, unless the man is a prig, the fact that people in positions of power or influence behave idiotically, or even that they behave wickedly. It is that they conspire successfully to impose upon the public a picture of themselves as so very sagacious, honest and well-intentioned.
-Claud Cockburn
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By rights, satire is a lonely and introspective occupation, for nobody can describe a fool to the life without much patient self-inspection.
-Frank Moore Colby
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I am skeptical in principle, gullible in practice.
-Mason Cooley
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A cynic is just a man who found out when he was ten that there wasn't any Santa Claus, and he's still upset.
-James G. Cozzens
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I believe no satirist could breathe this air. If another Juvenal or Swift could rise up among us tomorrow, he would be hunted down. If you have any knowledge of our literature, and can give me the name of any man, American born and bred, who has anatomized our follies as a people, and not as this or that party; and who has escaped the foulest and most brutal slander, the most inveterate hatred and intolerant pursuit; it will be a strange name in my ears, believe me.
-Charles Dickens
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Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded.
-Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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Blows are sarcasm's turned stupid.
-George Eliot
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Don't be a cynic and disconsolate preacher. Don't bewail and moan. Omit the negative propositions. Challenge us with incessant affirmatives. Don't waste yourself in rejection, or bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A cynic can chill and dishearten with a single word.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Cynicism is cheap -- you can buy it at any Monoprix store -- it's built into all poor-quality goods.
-Graham Greene
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A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past; he is one who is prematurely disappointed in the future.
-Sydney J. Harris
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Satirists gain the applause of others through fear, not through love.
-William Hazlitt
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It takes a clever man to turn cynic and a wise man to be clever enough not to.
-Fannie Hurst
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It is difficult not to write satire.
-Juvenal
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It is said that truth comes from the mouths of fools and children: I wish every good mind which feels an inclination for satire would reflect that the finest satirist always has something of both in him.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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Cynicism is the intellectual cripple's substitute for intelligence.
-Russell Lynes
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A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
-H. L. Mencken
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The cynics are right nine times out of ten.
-H. L. Mencken
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Books about Cynicism
