Quotes
—Why can I never visualize things turning out better as clearly as I can visualize the catastrophes I scraped past by a hair? “Everything for the best in the best of all possible worlds!” Hah!
p. 40
"You see, you are an optimist and live on hope. I am a pessimist and live on experience."
p. 352
If the world has a mind then it's all worse than we thought.
A fisherman who wasn’t a born pessimist hadn’t been going to sea long enough.
p. 131
When Cassius was optimistic about the way the fighting was going, he was often wrong; when he was pessimistic, he was always right.
p. 101
The world is boiling. You hardly dare open a paper these days: the news is all of cataclysm and collapse. Tempers are threadbare; the yobs are winning; everybody accepts the fact that they’ve got to get nastier in order to survive. The world is going bad on us. I’m having nothing to do with it.
Don't ask me how I knew—I suppose it was because it was just about the worst possible thing that was likely to happen.
By holding firmly to a pessimistic, realistic view of what is and is not possible in a society of different ethnicities, we might have maintained the principles of a free republic, and saved ourselves much trouble and expense. In the world at large, diversity causes nothing but problems.
We are a rugged species, up for anything the universe can throw at us; and as the great gloominaries knew, we will be immeasurably better prepared for nasty surprises if we approach the universe realistically - pessimistically - than if we continue to peer out at our surroundings through a distorting, rose-colored prism of wish-fulfillment fantasy.
The more depressed and maladjusted you are, the more likely it is that you are seeing things right, with minimal bias.
Eeyores are Realists, they say. But reality is what one makes it. And the more negative reality one nurtures and creates, the more of it one has.
I'm one of the more pessimistic cats on the planet. I make Van Gogh look like a rodeo clown.
