Lin Yutang Quotes

People don't believe or understand that a community can lose hope. You can have a whole community where hopelessness is the norm, where folks don't have faith that things will get better because history and circumstances have proven over 30, 40, or 50 years that things don't get better.

Loss of hope rather than loss of life is what decides the issues of war. But helplessness induces hopelessness.

A man can fight if he can see daylight down the road. But there ain’t no daylight in Vietnam. There’s not a bit.

Everything is the same, nothing is worthwhile, the world is senseless, knowledge strangles.

Stop war? Impossible! There is no cure for the world's disease.

Cynicism is a form of cowardice, a failure of courage to hope.

I used to think drinking was the only way to be happy. Now I know there is no way to be happy.

No matter how cynical you become, it's never enough to keep up.

Well, I've been reading a lot about the fifty years since the Second World War, about Western foreign policy and all that. I try not to let it get to me, but sometimes I just think that there's no hope.

I don't think the world is a particularly pleasant place.

I do get cynical, but what can you do? It doesn't make any difference.

When there is no hope, there can be no endeavor.

The world is always terrible.

Sometimes, in the trenches, you get the sense of something, ancient. One trench we held, it had skulls in the side, embedded, like mushrooms. It was actually easier to believe they were men from Marlborough's army, than to think they'd been alive a year ago. It was as if all the other wars had distilled themselves into this war, and that made it something you almost can't challenge. It's like a very deep voice, saying; 'Run along, little man, be glad you've survived

Famine, plague, death and war... that's a pretty good description of 1917-18. The war was meant to end quickly, but by 1917 it seemed to be set until the end of time. No wonder everyone dreamed of an apocalyptic intervention.

The day you were born, a ladder was set up to help you escape this world.

Hope is the most hopeless thing of all.

A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future.

Philosophy seems to me on the whole a rather hopeless business.

I must confess that I lost faith in the sanity of the world

It was hopeless, life, really. It was set up all wrong.

I think hope is the worst thing in the world. I really do. It makes a fool of you while it lasts. And then when it's gone, it's like there's nothing left of you at all . . . except what you can't be rid of.

He thought there was no hope for him. Me? I can't imagine a world without hope.

There's an infinite amount of hope but not for us.

Pessimism is not in being tired of evil but in being tired of good. Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy. It is when for some reason or other good things in a society no longer work that the society begins to decline; when its food does not feed, when its cures do not cure, when its blessings refuse to bless.