Top 88 Pessimist Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Pessimist Quotes from famous people such as Oscar Wilde, Louis MacNeice, Rene Descartes, Nouriel Roubini, Roberto Rossellini, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

Pessimist: One who, when he has the choice of two evils

Pessimist: One who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both.
Oscar Wilde
Wyndham Lewis is basically a pessimist, thinking of human beings as doomed animals or determinist machines. His theory of satire is based on this view, and he finds plenty of evidence to support it in contemporary practice.
Louis MacNeice
An optimist may see a light where there is none, but why must the pessimist always run to blow it out?
Rene Descartes
I’m not a pessimist by nature. I’m not someone who sees things in a bleak way.
Nouriel Roubini
I am not a pessimist; to perceive evil where it exists is, in my opinion, a form of optimism.
Roberto Rossellini
I’m a pessimist. But I think I’d describe my pessimism as broken-hearted optimism.
Ellen Ullman
The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
Winston Churchill
I’m a massive pessimist.
Dan Smith
I am a huge pessimist, and I think that’s just the east-coast Jew in me.
Ben Feldman
I’m a bad pessimist. I don’t think about how successful any record I’ve ever done is going to do before it came out.
Phil Anselmo
Pessimists are usually kind. The gay, bubbling over, have to time for the pitiful.
Sean O’Faolain
I never considered myself a lucky person. I’m the most extraordinary pessimist. I truly am.
Christopher Nolan
Don’t ever become a pessimist… a pessimist is correct oftener than an optimist, but an optimist has more fun, and neither can stop the march of events.
Robert A. Heinlein
A pessimist and an optimist, so much the worse; so much the better.
Jean de La Fontaine
I’m one of life’s pessimists. I’m ready for everything to go wrong at any moment.
Josh Widdicombe
I’m not a pessimist. I do believe that in some way we don’t understand, God has a hand in things and it will all work out for America. Our money says In God We Trust. And we are the best country, aren’t we?
Orson Bean
I’m a technological optimist in that I do believe that technology will provide solutions that will allow the world in 2050 to support 9 billion people at an acceptable standard of living. But I’m a political pessimist in that I am concerned about whether the science will be appropriately applied.
Martin Rees
I can be a real pessimist. You know that when you win an Oscar, and you walk offstage, and your first thought is: ‘Oh God, I’ve peaked.’
Cate Blanchett
My pessimism extends to the point of even suspecting the sincerity of other pessimists.
Jean Rostand
Pessimists are born, true, but they also can be made.
David Rakoff
And our pessimists think this has taken too long. Our pessimists believe that too many Americans have died. Our pessimists believe that we have lost the war.
John Linder
Scratch a pessimist and you find often a defender of privilege.
William Beveridge
I’m a pessimist by nature, so I don’t believe something until someone has kind of punched me over the head with it.
Theo James
I am an optimist, unrepentant and militant. After all, in order not to be a fool an optimist must know how sad a place the world can be. It is only the pessimist who finds this out anew every day.
Peter Ustinov
History never repeats, but there are the obvious precedents that pessimists can reach for: Sarajevo, 1914; the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, 1938. But equally relevant might be the tragically meaningless guarantees Britain extended to Poland in 1939.
Alistair Horne
I think I probably hoped for it a little bit, but I’m not an optimist. I’m a realist… or maybe even a pessimist.
Clay Aiken
I happen to be a pessimist, and maybe that’s a good thing because I don’t stop to smell the roses – which is not a good personal thing. I don’t stop and enjoy those moments… Always on to the next and never in the moment.
Nicki Minaj
In falling markets, there is nothing that has not happened before. The bear or pessimist sees only the past, which imprisons the wretched financial soul in eternal circles of boom and bust and boom again.
James Buchan
Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people who think the human race is beneath their notice, that they’re better than other human beings.
James Baldwin
Sometimes people ask me, ‘Are you an optimist or a pessimist?’ It doesn’t matter. Whether I have a future or not is for me to decide.
Raoul Peck
Yet creeds mean very little, Coth answered the dark god, still speaking almost gently. The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.
James Branch Cabell
Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and opt

Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.
Lewis Mumford
No Christian can be a pessimist, for Christianity is a system of radical optimism.
William Inge
Pessimism doesn’t grow your business or even maintain the status quo. The pessimists on your staff make the job harder for everyone around them. They make difficulties out of opportunities.
Harvey Mackay
I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.
Antonio Gramsci
I don’t think I’m a total pessimist, so I think you can find hope in all my films.
Spike Lee
It might interest you to know that the 1828 Noah Webster Dictionary identifies the optimist in complimentary terms, but says nothing about the pessimist. The word ‘pessimist’ was not in our vocabulary at that time. It’s a modern ‘invention’ which I believe we should ‘dis-invent.’
Zig Ziglar
I’ve never seen a monument erected to a pessimist.
Paul Harvey
My first task is to show how great we are as a nation – let’s banish the pessimists.
Andrea Leadsom
I’m always naturally a bit of a pessimist. And my mom is sorta the opposite.
John Collins
I have lived long enough to witness the vanishing of wild mammals, butterflies, mayflies, songbirds and fish that I once feared my grandchildren would not experience: it has all happened faster than even the pessimists predicted.
George Monbiot
I guess I’m a hopeful optimist, because to be a pessimist is to be suicidal.
Peter Benchley
A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
Winston Churchill
In my last year of school, I was voted Class Optimist and Class Pessimist. Looking back, I realize I was only half right.
Jack Nicholson
My pessimism goes to the point of suspecting the sincerity of the pessimists.
Edmond Rostand
If we don’t change from a world society that worships money and power to one that worships compassion and generosity, I think we’ll be extinct by mid-century. I don’t say that as an alarmist or as a pessimist.
Patch Adams
I’m a happy person! I guess I’m not as much of a pessimist as most documentary filmmakers.
Alexandra C. Pelosi
A pessimist is a man who looks both ways when he crosses the street.
Laurence J. Peter
To describe someone as a pessimist is to issue an insult, whereas to be labelled an optimist is to get a pat on the back. To dismiss someone’s argument as pessimistic is to suggest it is the product of a personality disorder, rather than careful analysis.
David Olusoga
The first line in the first ‘Gasland’ is: ‘I’m not a pessimist. I’ve always had a great deal of faith in people that we won’t succumb to frenzy or rage or greed. That we’ll figure out a solution without destroying the things that we love.’ I have not lost that sense.
Josh Fox
I’m a kind of hard-wired pessimist. I can’t help but see the world in a certain kind of way.
Nick Cave
I have been judged to be a pessimist but what abyss of ignorance and low egoism is not hidden in one who thinks that Man is the god of himself and that his future can only be triumphant?
Eugenio Montale
If I’m going to be a pessimist, then I should just stop writing for young people because that’s too heavy a burden to put on young readers. But also, I get to meet with people who have waded through horrible things, and they get up every morning, and they try to do their best.
Deborah Ellis
I don’t consider myself a pessimist. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel soaked to the skin.
Leonard Cohen
Every pessimist who ever lived has been buried in an unmarked grave. Tomorrow has always been better than today, and it always will be.
Paul Harvey
I’m not particularly fond of Shoah jokes, yet there is one I cannot forget: Why was Auschwitz an optimistic place? Because all the pessimists were already in New York by then.
Yair Lapid
The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it, he knows too little.
Mark Twain
Hold on to your dream. Don’t let past failures or dire economic forecasts make you a pessimist. Keep your youthful dreams alive and create your own opportunities.
Paul Zane Pilzer
I have always been – I think any student of history almost inevitably is – a cheerful pessimist.
Jacques Barzun
The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.
George Will
History has suggested that the pessimists have been wrong time and time again.
David Autor
I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.
Henry Adams
I'm a total pessimist.

I’m a total pessimist.
Thomas Middleditch
We all deal with our inner pessimist. We just try to find as much positivity as we can find.
Eddy Alvarez
Whereas in the past optimism had been regarded as rather shallow – because ‘oh well, it’s just your temperament, you happen to be just a cheerful sort of person’ – what I wanted to do was to establish that in fact it is the pessimists who are allowing all kinds of errors to creep into their work.
Colin Wilson
I’m a bit of a pessimist, oh yeah, and I always think the film I’m about to make is going to be a disaster.
Lenny Abrahamson
I thought all my life that optimists and pessimists pass away the same way, so why be a pessimist?
Shimon Peres