Misguided Optimism Quotes

When we hope, we usually hope for the wrong thing.

It is easy to become the dupe of a deferred purpose, of the promise the future can never keep, and I had fallen into the meanest type of self-deception in making myself believe that all this was in preparation for great things to come.

As the First World War made painfully clear, when politicians and generals lead nations into war, they almost invariably assume swift victory, and have a remarkably enduring tendency not to foresee problems that, in hindsight, seem obvious.

The illusion when things are going your way is that it's gonna just keep going. But it never does.

You've heard of people living in a fool's paradise? Well, Leonora has a duplex there.

The most central and irrational faith among people is the faith in technology and economical growth. Its priests believe until their death that material prosperity bring enjoyment and happiness - even though all the proofs in history have shown that only lack and attempt cause a life worth living, that the material prosperity doesn't bring anything else than despair. These priests believe in technology still when they choke in their gas masks.

If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn't. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.

Everyone in Annawadi talks like this: 'Oh, I will make my child a doctor, a lawyer, and he will make us rich'. It's vanity, nothing more. Your little boat goes west and you congratulate yourself, 'what a navigator I am!' And then the wind blows you east.

The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions.

The people who voted for President Obama are just beginning to wake up to exactly what they brought in. The 'change' they envisioned is not the 'change' they have gotten.

A truth that disheartens because it is true is of more value than the most stimulating of falsehoods.

A sublime faith in human imbecility has seldom led those who cherish it astray.

Men who expect universal peace through invention of destructive weapons of war are no wiser than one who, noting the improvement of agricultural implements, should prophesy an end to the tilling of the soil.

People act as though the hybrid could solve all of our problems - which is certainly not the case.

You predicted quick victory. Now it’s going to get hopelessly complicated. Jesus, don’t you know any better than that by now?

The plan of "counting the chickens before they are hatched" is an error of ancient date, but it does not seem to improve by age.

I have had four happy days in my life, and three of them turned out to be illusions.

There's a lot of overconfidence about this bill. We're going to expose it. It will not pass.

If you're young and inexperienced you might accept what people tell you, that everything's going to be fine, it's okay. It's usually other young people saying that, who don't know any better. It's good to have a survival instinct because increasingly, especially in the whole Arab Spring sort of violence, you're mostly with young people who have not experienced what they're doing before.