Curmudgeon Quotes

Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

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…

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.

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

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

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

Life is one long process of getting tired.

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

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

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.

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

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

I’m an old curmudgeon and I know it.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

I feel sorry for people who do not have a Bible to lean on.

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

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

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

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

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

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