Curmudgeon Quotes

I really liked playing [Wilson]. I started to really - I mean, I think the thing about him is he's not really a curmudgeon, he's very gregarious. And he's a people person.

I love playing a curmudgeon. I just love playing a sour guy.

I make a joke that I'm the Internet curmudgeon, but 'wary' is a good way to put it.

It must be admitted that there are some parts of the soul which we must entirely paralyse before we can live happily in this world.

This world is gradually becoming a place Where I do not care to be any more.

All our lives we are putting pennies — our most golden pennies — into penny-in-the-slot machines that are almost always empty.

How I wish that somewhere there existed an island for those who are wise and of good will.

The dignity of man lies in his ability to face reality in all its meaninglessness.

In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.

I love mankind; it's people I can't stand.

Many of us go through life feeling as an actor might feel who does not like his part and does not believe in the play.

There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.

Sometimes you wake up in the morning and wish your parents had never met.

Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.

It suddenly dawned on me one day, when I was reading in the paper about a woman wrestler, that being a curmudgeon was the last thing in the world that a man can be that a woman cannot be. Women can be irritating -- after all, they are women -- but they cannot be curmudgeons.

But you know, I'm the negative-Nancy, curmudgeon, glass-half-empty-with-a-leak-in-it guy - which is basically the fuel that fires me up anyway. Without that, we wouldn't have me.

I've always been interested in people, but I've never liked them.

Anybody who notices unpleasant facts in the have-a-nice-day world we live in is going to be designated a curmudgeon.

I'm an old curmudgeon and I know it.

It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.

The easy path of aging is to become a thick-skinned, unbudging curmudgeon, a battle-ax. To grow soft and sweet is the harder way.

I am no longer a curmudgeon. I am a curmudgeon emeritus.

When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.

Comfort, or revelation: God owes us one of these, but surely not both.

I have been called a curmudgeon, which my obsolescent dictionary defines as a "surly, illmannered, badtempered fellow." ... Nowadays, curmudgeon is likely to refer to anyone who hates hypocrisy, cant, sham, dogmatic ideologies, the pretenses and evasions of euphemism, and has the nerve to point out unpleasant facts and takes the trouble to impale these sins on the skewer of humor and roast them over the fires of empiric fact, common sense, and native intelligence. In this nation of bleating sheep and braying jackasses, it then becomes an honor to be labeled curmudgeon.

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

Gu was a worrier, a neurotic curmudgeon. If he had a headache, it was a brain tumor; if it looked like rain, this year's harvest was ruined. This was his way of controlling the situation, his lifelong strategy for always coming out ahead. Now, when reality looked more dire than any of his fatalisitic predictions, he had no choice but to turn tail and charge in the opposite direction.

My generation didn`t face the kind of urgent, pressing issues that my parents did, who fought through a war and a Depression and know what suffering is. That`s why Bob Dole had a tough time with this electorate. He was an old-fashioned curmudgeon who knew about sacrifice, and we didn`t know if we could live up to his standards. But we knew we could live up to Bill Clinton`s. He`s more like one of us.

If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can't be done.

When we are born we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.

Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.

Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.

We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.

The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.

Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.

I don't answer the phone. I get the feeling whenever I do that there will be someone on the other end.

I never knew whether to pity or congratulate a man on coming to his senses.

The better I get to know men, the more I find myself loving dogs.

I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.

Throughout history in the theater and film people do like sarcastic characters, and they do like curmudgeons - if they're amusing, they do like them despite the fact that they're vitriolic, particularly if they're for the right thing. If you can see that the person is a decent person and is for the right thing, and is not just a nasty person with base motives, but someone who is a decent human but expresses himself.

I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.

Life is one long process of getting tired.

Mad, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence.

You have come into a hard world. I know of only one easy place in it, and that is the grave.

It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.

Pasteboard pies and paper flowers are being banished from the stage by the growth of that power of accurate observation which is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it...

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.