Quotes & Sayings About Misanthropy

Of course, I'm not quite ready to forsake all the products of society, just yet. I have my clothes, my books, etc ... But more and more I can see myself leaving much of the rest behind - leaving their makers, and the crucible from which they proceed. If at times, after all, I might benefit by the rays of the sun, must I seek also to reside in its nuclear core? — Mark X.

... in that moment, as he saw and smelled how irresistible its effect was and how with lightning speed it spread and made captives of the people all around him - in that moment his whole disgust for humankind rose up again within him and completely soured his triumph, so that he felt not only no joy, but not even the least bit of satisfaction. What he had always longed for - that other people should love him - became at the moment of his achievement unbearable, because he did not love them himself, he hated them. And suddenly he knew that he had never found gratification in love, but always only in hatred - in hating and in being hated. — Patrick Suskind

One must avoid snobbery and misanthropy. But one must also be unafraid to criticise those who reach for the lowest common denominator, and who sometimes succeed in finding it. This criticism would be effortless if there were no "people" waiting for just such an appeal. Any fool can lampoon a king or a bishop or a billionaire. A trifle more grit is required to face down a mob, or even a studio audience that has decided it knows what it wants and is entitled to get it. And the fact that kings and bishops and billionaires often have more say than most in forming appetites and emotions of the crowd is not irrelevant, either. — Christopher Hitchens

But the truth is that I dislike most men as much as I dislike women. If anything, I am an equal opportunity misanthropist. — Andrew Davidson

What should worry us is not the number of people who oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so. We should therefore divert our attention away from the presence of unpopularity to the explanations for it. It may be frightening to hear that a high proportion of a community holds us to be wrong, but before abandoning our position, we should consider the method by which their conclusions have been reached. It is the soundness of their method of thinking that should determine the weight we give to their disapproval. We seem afflicted by the opposite tendency: to listen to everyone, to be upset by every unkind word and sarcastic observation. We fail to ask ourselves the cardinal and most consoling question: on what basis has this dark censure been made? We treat with equal seriousness the objections of the critic who has thought rigorously and honestly and those of the critic who has acted out of misanthropy and envy. — Alain De Botton

I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am. — Samuel Johnson

By four o'clock, I've discounted suicide in favor of killing everyone else in the entire world instead. — Warren Ellis

You ever get the feeling the world's filling up with bastards? I do. What I want to know is what happens when all the bastards run out of people to crap on? What happens when all that's left in the world is bastards? ... The golden rule. Screw unto others before they screw unto you. — William Hoffman

Misanthropes have some admirable - if paradoxical - virtues. It is no exaggeration to say that we are among the nicest people you are likely to meet. Because good manners build sturdy walls, our distaste for intimacy makes us exceedingly cordial. "ships that pass in the night." As long as you remain a stranger we will be your friend forever. — Florence King

I also believe in cigarettes, cholesterol, alcohol, carbon monoxide, masturbation, the Arts Council, nuclear weapons, the Daily Telegraph, and not properly labeling fatal poisons, but above all else, most of all, I believe in the one thing that can come out of people's mouths: vomit. — Dennis Potter

A poet or philosopher should have no fault to find with his age if it only permits him to do his work undisturbed in his own corner; nor with his fate if the corner granted him allows of his following his vocation without having to think about other people. — Arthur Schopenhauer

He loved the people just as much as he feared and detested persons. — Sinclair Lewis

I killed little Esmerelda because I felt I owed it to myself and to the world in general. I had, after all, accounted for two male children and thus done womankind something of a statistical favour. If I really had the courage of my convictions, I reasoned, I ought to redress the balance at least slightly. My cousin was simply the easiest and most obvious target. — Iain Banks

I must ration my tendons when people near me. — Sean Kilpatrick

I found him well educated, with unusual powers of mind, but infected with misanthropy, and subject to perverse moods of alternate enthusiasm and melancholy. — Edgar Allan Poe

What's wrong with people is people. There's no cure for that. — Marty Rubin

The opinions of the misanthropical rest upon this very partial basis, that they adopt the bad faith of a few as evidence of the worthlessness of all. — Christian Nestell Bovee

Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our kind, precisely because they resemble us. — Emil Cioran

As I railed on and on, I became increasingly energied and excited by my own misery and misanthropy until I reached a kind of orgasm of negativity.' ... The Brits don't merely enjoy misery, they get off on it. — Eric Weiner

Matheus thought he ranked fairly high on the scowling index, but looking at Zeb made him realize how much more he had to learn. Whole volumes of misanthropy were written into the eyebrows alone. — Amy Fecteau

Stay low, stay quiet, keep it simple, don't expect too much, enjoy what you have. — Dean Koontz

We ought to punish pitilessly that shameful pretence of friendly intercourse. I like a man to be a man, and to show on all occasions the bottom of his heart in his discourse. Let that be the thing to speak, and never let our feelings be beneath vain compliments — Moliere

Early in 1967 Highsmith's agent told her why her books did not sell in paperback in America. It was, said Patricia Schartle Myrer, because they were 'too subtle', combined with the fact that none of her characters were likeable. 'Perhaps it is because I don't like anyone,' Highsmith replied. 'My last books may be about animals'. — Andrew Wilson

Nero would be long since forgotten without his outbursts of bloody clowning. ~ Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay — Emil Cioran

Everything else just kept picking and picking, hacking away. And nothing was interesting, nothing. The people were restrictive and careful, all alike. And I've got to live with these fuckers for the rest of my life, I thought. — Charles Bukowski

Dantes had entered the Chateau d'If with the round, open, smiling face of a young and happy man, with whom the early
paths of life have been smooth. and who anticipates a future corresponding with his past. This was now all changed. The oval face was lengthened, his smiling mouth had assumed the firm and marked
lines which betoken resolution; his eyebrows were arched beneath a brow furrowed with thought; his eyes were full of melancholy, and from their depths occasionally sparkled gloomy fires of misanthropy and hatred; his complexion, so long kept from the sun, had now that pale color which produces, when the features are encircled with black hair, the aristocratic beauty of the man of the north; the profound learning he had acquired had besides diffused over his features a refined intellectual expression; and he had also acquired, being naturally of a goodly stature, that vigor which a frame possesses which has so long concentrated all its force within itself. — Alexandre Dumas

I believe that there is an equality to all humanity. We all suck. — Bill Hicks

I wish I loved the human Race, I wish I loved its silly face, and when I'm introduced to one, I wish I thought "what jolly fun"! — Walter Alexander Raleigh

Their mutual misanthropy had sealed the deal. — Rob Thomas

An attraction to large predators often seems to be associated with misanthropy, racism and the far right. — George Monbiot

Landscape painting is the obvious resource of misanthropy. — William Hazlitt

I expect nothing of man, and disown the race. The only folly is expecting what is never attained; man is most contemptible when compared with his own pretensions. It is better to laugh at man from outside the universe, than to weep for him within. — H.P. Lovecraft

The wolf had been trained by the man, or had trained himself unassisted, to divers wolfish arts, which swelled the receipts. "Above all things, do not degenerate into a man," his friend would say to him. Never did the wolf bite: the man did now and then. At least, to bite was the intent of Ursus. He was a misanthrope, and to italicize his misanthropy he had made himself a juggler. To live, also; for the stomach has to be consulted. — Victor Hugo

Regardless of its causes, thoughtlessly blaming the present is a weakness which, even if it is never outlawed, ought to be resisted. Though commonly flaunted as a sign of sophistication, it can be an opportunity for one-upmanship and an excuse for misanthropy, especially against the young. — Steven Pinker

She freed me from my misanthropy, silence and inhibitions. From my compulsion to only make the right moves. — Nina George

Sensuality reconciles us with the human race. The misanthropy of the old is due in large part to the fading of the magic glow of desire. — Eric Hoffer

People diminish me;
the longer I sit and listen to them
the more empty I feel but I don't get
the idea that they feel empty, I feel
that they enjoy the sound from their
mouths. — Charles Bukowski

There are many men in London, you know, who, some from shyness, some from misanthropy, have no wish for the company of their fellows. Yet they are not averse to comfortable chairs and the latest periodicals. It is for the convenience of these that the Diogenes Club was started, and it now contains the most unsociable and unclubbable men in town. No member is permitted to take the least notice of any other one. Save in the Stranger's Room, no talking is, under any circumstances, allowed, and three offenses, if brought to the notice of the committee, render the talker liable to expulsion. My brother was one of the founders, and I have myself found it a very soothing atmosphere. — Arthur Conan Doyle

Too many people not enough monkeys — Anonymous

The people naturally adhere most to doctrines which demand the least self-exertion and the least use of their own reason, and which can best accommodate their duties to their inclinations. — Immanuel Kant

Their arrogance protected them against any liking for their fellow-man, against the slightest interest in the strangers sitting all about them, amidst whom M. de Stermaria adopted the manner one has in the buffet-car of a train, grim, hurried, stand-offish, brusque, fastidious and spiteful, surrounded by other passengers whom one has never seen before, whom one will never see again and towards whom the only conceivable way of behaving is to make sure that they keep away from one's cold chicken and stay out of one's chosen corner-seat. — Marcel Proust

Weapons of Mass Destruction: Radioactive, Biological, or Chemical weapons capable of causing mass casualties and great destruction.

I wonder why humans aren't on the list? — Jorge Angeles

Misanthropy ariseth from a man trusting another without having sufficient knowledge of his character, and, thinking him to be truthful, sincere, and honourable, finds a little afterwards that he is wicked, faithless, and then he meets with another of the same character. When a man experiences this often, and more particularly from those whom he considered his most dear and best friends, at last, having frequently made a slip, he hates the whole world, and thinks that there is nothing sound at all in any of them. — Plato

Whenever I tell people I'm a misanthrope they react as though that's a bad thing, the idiots. I live in London, for God's sake. Have you walked down Oxford Street recently? Misanthropy's the only thing that gets you through it. It's not a personality flaw, it's a skill.
It's nothing to do with sheer numbers. Move me to a remote cottage in the Hebrides and I'd learn to despise the postman, even if he only visited once a year. I can't abide other people, with their stink and their noise and their irritating ringtones. Bill Hicks called the human race 'a virus with shoes', and if you ask me he was being unduly hard on viruses; I'd consider a career in serial killing if the pay wasn't so bad. — Charlie Brooker

The earth is another form of hell, and men are its demons — Anonymous

What is Man? A miserable little pile of secrets. — Andre Malraux

If I have a book that thinks for me, a pastor who acts as my conscience, a physician who prescribes my diet, and so on... then I have no need to exert myself. I have no need to think, if only I can pay; others will take care of that disagreeable business for me. — Immanuel Kant

Betrayed and wronged in everything,
I'll flee this bitter world where vice is king,
And seek some spot unpeopled and apart
Where I'll be free to have an honest heart. — Moliere

Whoever is not a misanthrope at forty can never have loved mankind. — Nicolas Chamfort

I sense a hint of bitterness in this letter of yours and in a previous one. Excellent: we are living in a dark period, there is absolutely nothing going right, and the only consolation we have is to think about the brevity of life. I have to say that in this situation I am absolutely fine, and I am giving myself up finally to total misanthropy, which I now discover corresponds fully to my true nature. But you seem to be still anxious about something or other. Ha, ha! Don't worry, it will just get worse and worse. — Italo Calvino

I cant take it like this much longer, Milt," Karen said muffledly into the big CKC shirt with its male smell, allowing herself the luxury of letting the bars all the way down for once, enjoying for just this moment the eternal degradation of being a woman.
"I cant take it much longer," she whimpered, tasting it, the eternally caught and held hard in the grasp of some man, the forever humiliated heavy weight it was impossible to squirm out from under, the forever helpless except for the mercy of him who always takes what he wants without any, and that all women learn instinctively not to expect [ ... ] That was all they wanted. That was all any of them wanted. You give them the greatest thing you possess, the most intimate secret, and they
just take it. Well, let them have it. Let them all have some of it. Let them root and rut and rowel, as if it was no more important than that why were they all so anxious to keep it away from each other? — James Jones

I was not okay for one thing.For another, I'd passed from simple misanthropy to nihilism, death of the spirit and beyond. — T.C. Boyle

His eyebrows arched under a single, pensive line and his eyes themselves were imprinted with deep sadness, behind which from time to time could be seen dark flashes of misanthropy and hatred. — Alexandre Dumas

Do you hate people?"
"I don't hate them ... I just feel better when they're not around. — Charles Bukowski

I wish I was friends with things," he said at last, "but I'm not. I never had anything to be friends with, and I can't bear people. — Frances Hodgson Burnett

Some people will of course accuse me of misanthropy and cynicism. I can't celebrate humanity but I'm not out to indict it either. I just want to expose certain truths. — Todd Solondz

[F]rank knew he was guilty of arrogance and misanthropy, but he compensated by being kind to strangers and tipping really well at restaurants. — Sherman Alexie

He never cared too much for parties or people, but misanthropy could easily be cured by several alcoholic drinks. — Daniel J. Rice

I cannot but conclude that the Bulk of your Natives, to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth. — Jonathan Swift

There has to be something wrong when spurning reproduction doesn't make Gabriella and me the "mavericks" we'd both have prided ourselves as in our younger days but standard issue for our era. Surely the contemporary absorption with our own lives as the be-all and end-all ultimately hails from an insidious misanthropy - a lack of faith in the whole human enterprise. In its darkest form, the growing cohort of childless couples determined to throw all their money at Being Here Now - to take that step aerobics class, visit Tanzania, put an addition on the house while making no effort to ensure there's someone around to inherit the place when the party is over - has the quality of the mad, slightly hysterical scenes of gleeful abandon that fiction — Lionel Shriver

I'd take cyanide no problem if it was that or throwing a cat out in the street, even a moth-eaten, mangy, caterwauling pain in the ass! I'd rather have the thing in bed with me than see it suffer on my account ... though when it comes to human beings, I'm only interested in the sick ... the ones who can stand up are nothing but mounds of vice and spite ... I don't get mixed up in their schemes ... — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

He was regarded merely as an eccentric employee of indifferent merit, and his post of deputy chief clerk was the highest he would ever reach. Well aware of this, he made it a rule never to show any zeal, except in special circumstances. It is true that in these cases his zeal was clothed with a spirit of vengeance directed against the whole human race - this being his second favourite occupation. Petitbidois would have liked to hold the reins of power. This being beyond his sphere, he utilized the small driblets of authority which came his way for the purpose of casting ridicule upon established law and order, by making it act as a sort of unintelligent and, if possible, malicious Providence. 'The world is an idiot place anyway,' he would say, 'so why worry? Life is just a lottery. Let us leave the decision to chance. — Gabriel Chevallier

Surely not without reason, when pirates, highwaymen, and other varieties of the extensive genus Marauder, are the only beau ideal of the active, as splenetic and railing misanthropy is of the speculative energy. — Thomas Love Peacock

A sour view of things, I grant you; but one borne out by the history of our age and of the age to come, when Trinity--not the Christians' but Oppenheimer's--will turn Alamogordo sand to glass. In the future, dead cities will molder behind rusting thorns no prince can ever penetrate; dirty bombs will engender tribes of lepers--not by germs, but by deadly atoms; and radioactive isotopes will be left to cool for an age or more, sealed in burial chambers with a pharaoh's curse. — Norman Lock

Out of the ashes of misanthropy benevolence rises again; we find many virtues where we had imagined all was vice, many acts of disinterested friendship where we had fancied all was calculation and fraud
and so gradually from the two extremes we pass to the proper medium; and, feeling that no human being is wholly good or wholly base, we learn that true knowledge of mankind which induces us to expect little and forgive much. The world cures alike the optimist and the misanthrope. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

People think they're interesting. That's their first mistake. — Elizabeth McCracken

Misanthropy is a suit of armor lined with thorns. — Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach

It is one of the major tragedies that nothing is more discomforting than the hearty affection of the Old Friends who never were friends. — Sinclair Lewis

Racism? But isn't it only a form of misanthropy? — Joseph Brodsky

Waking up is the strongest argument for full-blown misanthropy. — M.J. Nicholls

You call me a misanthrope because I avoid society. You err; I love society. Yet in order not to hate people, I must avoid their company. — Caspar David Friedrich

Most people are so mind-bogglingly aggravating that it's impossible to overreact to them, even if that means killing yourself. — Maija Haavisto

I'm interested in stories which insist on a dog fails-to-eat-dog kind of world. I hate misanthropy, want to believe that there's a possibility that we might all be redeemed, that hope deferred makes the soul sick, that our humanity is fragile, funny, common, crazy, full of the longing for love, the failure of love. — Anthony Minghella

The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous. — Emil Cioran

I'm tired of this back-slappin' "isn't humanity neat" bullshit. We're a virus with shoes. — Bill Hicks

How frequently has melancholy and even misanthropy taken possession of me, when the world has disgusted me, and friends have proven unkind. I have then considered myself as a particle broken off from the grand mass of mankind. — Mary Wollstonecraft

Being late was a special kind of modern suffering, with blended elements of rising tension, self-blame, self-pity, misanthropy, and a yearning for what could not be had outside theoretical physics: time reversal. — Ian McEwan

Misanthropy is born, I think, out of an almost oppressive sense of loneliness, a conviction that there's no one on earth who understands you. I don't think misanthropes hate people: They hate that people hate them. — Hanya Yanagihara

A fine line separates the weary recluse from the fearful hermit. Finer still is the line between hermit and bitter misanthrope. — Dean Koontz

The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage. — Jonathan Franzen

Self-contempt is a serpent that ever gnaws at one's breath, sucking the life-blood from one's own heart and mixing it with the poison of misanthropy and despair. — Karl Marx

At moments like this, his misanthropy sensitized him to the people packed tight around him, no longer fellow travelers but adversaries, competitors in a slow race. And he could not help himself: he was on the lookout for one of those cheats who edge up on the periphery of vision, moving while pretending not to, cutting in with a sly shuffle, a subtle turn of the shoulder. Burdening others by stealing time. — Ian McEwan

I have always hated crowds. I like deserts, prisons, and monasteries. I have discovered, too, that there are fewer idiots at 3000 meters above sea level than down below. — Jean Giono

I had sucked on the tit of disillusionment and teethed on the bitter root of cynicism. I was on the way to the misanthropy that would sour me. — Norman Lock

The human race had always disgusted me. essentially, what made them disgusting was the family-relationship illness, which included marriage, exchange of power and aid, which neighborhood, your district, your city, your county, your state, your nation-everybody grabbing each other's assholes in the Honeycomb of survival out of a fear-animalistic stupidity. — Charles Bukowski

Nineteen twentieths of [mankind is] opaque and unenlightened. Intimacy with most people will make you acquainted with vices and errors and follies enough to make you despise them. — John Adams

Misanthropy is a slow suicide. — Friedrich Schiller

There is nothing I detest so much as the contortions of these great time-and-lip servers, these affable dispensers of meaningless embraces, these obliging utterers of empty words, who view every one in civilities — Moliere

From the poetry of Lord Byron they drew a system of ethics compounded of misanthropy and voluptuousness,-a system in which the two great commandments were to hate your neighbour and to love your neighbour's wife. — Thomas B. Macaulay

You always feel like you are the only one in the world, like everyone else is crazy for each other, but it's not true. Generally, people don't like each other very much. And that goes for friends, too. — Miranda July

Oh, misanthropy and sourness. Gary wanted to enjoy being a man of wealth and leisure, but the country was making it none too easy. All around him, millions of newly minted American millionaires were engaged in the identical pursuit of feeling extraordinary - of buying the perfect Victorian, of skiing the virgin slope, of knowing the chef personally, of locating the beach that had no footprints. There were further tens of millions of young Americans who didn't have money but were nonetheless chasing the Perfect Cool. And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool; because whom would this leave to be ordinary? Who would perform the thankless work of being comparatively uncool? — Jonathan Franzen

The angry men know that this golden age (of fossil fuels) has gone; but they cannot find the words for the constraints they hate. Clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged, they flail around, accusing those who would impede them of communism, fascism, religiosity, misanthropy, but knowing at heart that these restrictions are driven by something far more repulsive to the unrestrained man: the decencies we owe to other human beings. — George Monbiot

I don't care if you're a parent giving to a child, a worker to a company, or a romantic to a lover, this behavior eventually leads to resentment. There's always a hidden agenda of What's in it for me? It's often suppressed, and this is why sacrifice is ultimately unwise and incomplete. Does this mean that there's no such thing as altruism, philanthropy, or generosity? No, it just means that anytime these exist, so do egocentricity, misanthropy, and greed. There's always a balancing force, even if it's sometimes hidden or unconscious. — John Frederick Demartini

...And suddenly, from behind me, I hear the metaphysically abrupt arrival of the office boy. I feel like I could kill him for barging in on what I wasn't thinking. I turn around and look at him with a silence full of hatred, tense with latent homicide, my mind already hearing the voice he'll use to tell me something or other. He smiles from the other side of the room and says 'Good afternoon' in a loud voice. I hate him like the universe. My eyes are sore from imagining. — Fernando Pessoa

I dislike my fellow-mortals. Justice compels me to add that they appear for the most part to dislike me.
The Man from Archangel — Arthur Conan Doyle

If there be any among those common objects of hatred which I can safely say I doe contemn and laugh at, it is that great enemy of reason, vertue and religion, the multitude, that numerous piece of monstrosity, which taken asunder seeme men, and the reasonable creatures of God; but confused together, make but one great beast, & a monstrosity more prodigious than Hydra; it is no breach of Charity to call these fooles; it is the stile all holy Writers have afforded them, set down by Solomon in canonicall Scripture, and a point of our faith to beleeve so. — Thomas Browne

Hotel Waldhaus
We had no luck with the weather and the guests at our table were repellent in every respect. They even ruined Nietzsche for us. Even after they had had a fatal car accident and had been laid out in the church in Sils, we still hated them. — Thomas Bernhard

The one thing in me more powerful than a general misanthropy is an inescapable compassion for individuals. — Jasper Sole

Frankly, it's good enough to lock up in a drawer. — Moliere

Most people are full of themselves and speak only the obnoxiously superficial, in other words they're annoying as hell — Novala Takemoto