Scratch a cynic and you'll find a disappointed idealist.

The only activity a cynic will find contagious is yawning, that is, with other people, at other people.

— Criss Jami

Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a…

— Stephen Colbert

“That's what I've never been able to get about religion: that charmless combination of altruism and insanity. Give me a cynical, self-interested bastard any…

— Mike Carey

Why should we strive, with cynic frown, to knock their fairy castles down?

— Eliza Cook

Only the broken-hearted idealist can become a cynic.

— Mark Clifton

I get the cynicism thing all the time, although I don't really know where that comes from, because I think I'm actually the opposite…

— Matt Taibbi

“Skeptics are always marked by their total lack of skepticism towards whatever position they are defending.”

— Steve Madison

“Listen, O lord of the meeting rivers, things standing shall fall, but the moving ever shall stay.”

— Basava

An executive should be a realist; and no one is less realistic than the cynic.

— Peter Drucker

Remember that all is opinion. For what was said by the Cynic Monimus is manifest: and manifest too is the use of what was…

— Marcus Aurelius

The idea of The Boy Vs. The Cynic is the tension between the wide-eyed optimism in youthfulness where you think nothing can go wrong,…

— John Reuben Zappin

The cynic makes fun of all earnestness; he makes fun of everything and everyone who feels that something can be done. . . .…

— George Edgar Vincent

To me it seems to be important to believe people to be good even if they tend to be bad, because your own joy…

— Isaac Asimov

[in the]..curious way that my idealism has been mixed with my fatalism, so that I can possess the soul of a dreamer and that…

— Anais Nin

The only way to do my job without optimism would be as a cynic, and that's not my nature.

— Jon Snow