#optimism

Optimism is the opium of the people. ↗

— Milan Kundera

#optimism #people

The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism. ↗

— George Santayana

#any #anywhere #evil #existence #optimism

My optimism is not based primarily on the successful march of democracy in recent times but rather is based on the experience of having lived in a fear society and studied the mechanics of tyranny that sustain such a society. ↗

— Natan Sharansky

#democracy #experience #fear #having #lived

As long as I'm needed. I'll be ready to serve. I look forward with optimism. We need the Jews here. Move to Israel! Move to Israel! ↗

— Ariel Sharon

#here #i #israel #jews #long

There is no fun in psychiatry. If you try to get fun out of it, you pay a considerable price for your unjustifiable optimism. ↗

— Harry Stack Sullivan

#fun #get #optimism #out #pay

It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse. ↗

— Ezra Pound

#despair #difficulty #fear #optimism #poetry

If you really believed that you'd lost your soul, then when I found you in Volterra, you would have realized immediately what was happening, instead of thinking we were both dead together. But you didn't―you said 'Amazing. Carlisle was right,'" I reminded him, triumphant. "There's hope in you, after all." For once, Edward was speechless. "So let's both just be hopeful, all right?" I suggested. "Not that it matters. If you stay, I don't need heaven." He got up slowly, and came to put his hand on either side of my face as he stared into my eyes. "Forever," he vowed, still a little staggered. "That's all I'm asking for," I said, and stretched up on my toes so that I could press my lips to his. ↗

— Stephenie Meyer

#optimism #optimism

Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable. ↗

— Michel Foucault

#optimism #resistance #struggle #optimism

It must be, I thought, one of the race's most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that "it can't happen here" -- that one's own time and place is beyond cataclysm. ↗

— John Wyndham

#security #security

We live, I suppose, in the unconfessed hope that the rules will at some point be broken, along with the normal course of things and custom and history, and that this will happen to us, that we will experience it, that we — that is, I alone — will be the ones to see it. We always aspire, I suppose, to being the chosen ones, and it is unlikely otherwise that we would be prepared to live out the entire course of an entire life, which, however short or long, gradually gets the better of us. ↗

— Javier Marías

#exceptionalism #optimism #experience