Misanthropy Quotes
36 quotes
"Do you hate people?”“I don't hate them...I just feel better when they're not around."
"I believe that there is an equality to all humanity. We all suck."
"Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our kind, precisely because they resemble us."
"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."
"Qualsiasi uomo notevole, chiunque cioè non appartenga a quei 5/6 dell'umanità dotati tanto miseramente dalla natura, rimarrà dopo i quarant'anni difficilmente esente da una certa traccia di misantropia."
"I'm tired of this back-slappin' "isn't humanity neat" bullshit. We're a virus with shoes."
"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."
"A fine line separates the weary recluse from the fearful hermit. Finer still is the line between hermit and bitter misanthrope."
"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."
"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."
"Most people are full of themselves and speak only the obnoxiously superficial, in other words they're annoying as hell"
"I think he just loved being with the bears because they didn't make him feel bad. I get it too. When he was with the bears, they didn't care that he was kind of weird, or that he'd gotten into trouble for drinking too much and using drugs(which apparently he did a lot of). They didn't ask him a bunch of stupid questions about how he felt, or why he did what he did. They just let him be who he was."
"What's wrong with people is people. There's no cure for that."
"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"!"
"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'."
"She had to fight against developing too combative a personality or becoming altogether a misanthrope. She suddenly caught herself. "Misanthrope" is someone who dislikes everybody, not just men.And they certainly had a word for someone who hates women: "misogynist." But the male lexicographers had somehow neglected to coin a word for the dislike of men. They were almost entirely men themselves, she thought, and had been unable to imagine a market for such a word."
"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"
"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"
"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."
"It is one of the major tragedies that nothing is more discomforting than the hearty affection of the Old Friends who never were friends."
"The one thing in me more powerful than a general misanthropy is an inescapable compassion for individuals."
"By four o'clock, I've discounted suicide in favor of killing everyone else in the entire world instead."
Warren Ellis, Transmetropolitan, Vol. 3: Year of the Bastard
"Most people are so mind-bogglingly aggravating that it's impossible to overreact to them, even if that means killing yourself."
"...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."
"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."
"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."
"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..."
"Stay low, stay quiet, keep it simple, don't expect too much, enjoy what you have."
"Betrayed and wronged in everything,I’ll flee this bitter world where vice is king,And seek some spot unpeopled and apartWhere I’ll be free to have an honest heart."
"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."
"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?"
"Nobody enjoys the company of others as intensely as someone who usually avoids the company of others."
"Anna… envied Joan’s deep connection with the human race. She was a member of the club. Anna was half convinced she’d been begotten by a passing alien life-form on a human woman. It was as good an explanation as any for the sense she had of being an outsider."
"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."
"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."
"I seeIn many an eye that measures meThe mortal sickness of a mindToo unhappy to be kind.Undone with misery, all they canIs to hate their fello"