Pessimists Optimists Realists Quotes & Sayings

If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I think that kind of urgency is what makes this stage of the climate movement really different from what it was even a few years ago when it was much more of the professionalized NGOs lobbying behind closed doors and maybe having a march now and then. — Avi Lewis

In the 1970s, after the Damansky Island clashes, a joke began circulating: 'Optimists study English; pessimists study Chinese; and realists learn to use a Kalashnikov. — John Vaillant

Nuclear war is inevitable, says the pessimists; Nuclear war is impossible, says the optimists; Nuclear war is inevitable unless we make it impossible, says the realists. — Sydney J. Harris

When you're from the East Coast or you're from the South, people expect you to sound a certain way. So if you don't sound that way, people won't label you as that type of artist. For me, I had a whole new lane to create for myself being from Pittsburgh and being a Midwest artist. — Wiz Khalifa

To stand against the enemy is to rest in what Jesus has already done. — Pedro Okoro

That sound, the sound of a shell inserted into the receiver of the shotgun changed everything. — Perry Perrett

As actors, we're all encouraged to feel that each job is the last job. They plant some little electrode in your head at an early stage and you think, 'Be grateful, be grateful, be grateful.' — Daniel Day-Lewis

To paraphrase the disappeared Jimmy Hoffa, who certainly didn't go down in history for his foolish worries: "Eighty-five percent of what you worry about won't ever come to pass. And you can always deal with that other fifteen percent." Of course, look what happened to Jimmy Hoffa. — M.A. Harper

Throughout history governments have been chronically short of revenue. The reason should be clear: unlike you and me, governments do not produce useful goods and services that they can sell on the market; governments, rather than producing and selling services, live parasitically off the market and off society. — Murray Rothbard

When I figured out how to work my grill, it was quite a moment. I discovered that summer is a completely different experience when you know how to grill. — Taylor Swift

What many teachers observe as violent behavior is often really just playful aggression. — Brian Sutton-Smith

For that moment at least they seemed to give up external plans, theories, and codes, even the inescapable romantic curiosity about one another, to indulge in being simply and purely young, to share that sense of the world's affliction, that outgoing sorrow at the spectacle of Our Human Condition which anyone this age regards as reward or gratuity for having survived adolescence.
For them the music was sweet and painful, the strolling chains of tourists like a Dance of Death. They stood on the curb, gazing at one another, jostled against by hawkers and sightseers, lost as much perhaps in that bond of youth as in the depths of the eyes each contemplated. — Thomas Pynchon

A handgun ban is not realistically enforceable. Confiscating guns would require house-to-house searches and alienate the very individuals whose compliance is essential to the success of any regulation. If gun ownership were prohibited, organized crime would step in to provide the firearms that will continue to be procured with criminal intent. — Don Kates