Charles M. Young: "More Cynicism" @ This Can't Be Happening!

That famous definition of a cynic as someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing has come to define this present moment of American politics.


--Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

I know that I criticize you [Bernie Goldberg] and Fox News a lot, but only because you’re truly a terrible, cynical, disingenuous news organization.


--Jon Stewart

To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism--it is a recognition of history, the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.


--Barack Obama

This is an old argument, one that The Nation’s Benjamin DeMott examined in “Seduced by civility,” a 1996 essay subtitled, “Political manners and the crisis of democratic values.” The line back then, which hasn’t changed much in fourteen years, was that progressive politics was caught in a stranglehold of cynicism, meanness and counterproductive finger-pointing.


--Katrina vanden Heuvel

When I was in tenth grade, I had a habit of making disparaging comments about politicians in my world history class. The teacher got exasperated with me one day and said, “Oh Chuck, you’re just a cynic.” Other kids started calling me a cynic as well.

It seemed to make me a little bit dangerous, and for a few weeks I swaggered around with my new identity until it occurred to me that I had no idea what a cynic actually was.

So I looked it up in the dictionary and it said, as I recall, “a person who attributes base motives to others.” That described me accurately enough, but there was also a second definition, something to the effect of, “an adherent of the Cynic philosophy.”

“Wow,” I thought. “There’s a whole philosophy of attributing base motives to others? Why have I not heard of this?”

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