Accentuate the Negative/Quotes

"The cynic is one who never sees a good quality in a man and never fails to see a bad one. He is the human owl, vigilant in the darkness and blind to the light, always pursuing vermin and never hunting noble game."

—Henry Ward Beecher

"The scene's about the characters, and it's a nice scene, but I'm not here to accentuate what's nice."

—D. R. McLeod, The Agony Booth's recap of Hulk (2003)

Amanda Honeydew: Gosh, this place looks so tiny! I remember it was huge!
Enid Nightshade: It's quite small, actually.
Jadu Wali: Miniscule.
Ruby Cherrytree: Falling apart, most of it.
Enid Nightshade: There's only parts worth living in. You have to really squash up.

Mr. Hallow: Now girls, we're here to celebrate the castle's anniversary not exaggerate its shortcomings.

—The Worst Witch, "The Millennium Bug" (Season 2, Episode 13)

"I think these are passages we can skim past. They're awful, of course, but awful in a pedestrian way. I'm more interested in the more instructively awful passages of this book."

—Fred Clarke, on Tribulation Force

"I know we mainly focused on the shitty aspects, but let me tell you, that's the name of the game."

First Person: These autumn leaves sure are nice.
Cynic: Yeah, 'cause they're dead.

"For a lot of people, their first love is what they'll always remember. For me it's always been the first hate, and I think that hatred, though it provides often rather junky energy, is a terrific way of getting you out of bed in the morning and keeping you going. If you don't let it get out of hand, it can be canalized into writing. In this country where people love to be nonjudgmental when they can be, which translates as, on the whole, lenient, there are an awful lot of bubble reputations floating around that one wouldn't be doing one's job if one didn't itch to prick."

—Christopher Hitchens

"So class, the question I have to ask you is, why are you all so jaded and negative? Almost all the time, I hear you guys griping about something and are almost always finding something to complain about. When I was your age, that was actually considered annoying. What made the sudden change?"

"Things have changed since you were a kid, Professor [name censored], when you were a teen, being able to see the good in anything and anyone like Anne Frank or Pollyanna was considered admirable and a genius. Even then, people wanted to look smart and mature, and they did so by acting like Anne Frank. Nowadays, the only thing that changed was how people view 'smart' or 'mature' as. Today, your intelligence and maturity is inversely proportional to your attitude rather than directly. Someone like Anne Frank or Pollyanna today would be assumed to be mentally retarded, immature, ignorant, or flamboyantly gay. I think you can blame shows like Daria, House, and Malcolm in the Middle for instilling the image that smart people are always cynical, jaded, rude, and generally all around a 'Negative Nelly'."

—An exchange that happened in a Philosophy class.

"I’d much rather be doing comedy on a beach in a tiki bar on Costa Rica right now, but they don’t have comedy there, they don’t need comedians, because they’re already smiling naturally. Comedy works when people are miserable and for that reason alone, you are the best audiences on Earth."

—Doug Stanhope

"Why? Because it's easier to be negative. That part will never change."

—Cracked, "5 complaints about modern life that are statistically B.S."

"It's not a critic's job to have an opinion. A good critic should have no opinion of his own. When a critic sits in a theater to watch the movie, his job is to forget that he is watching the movie, and instead, to pretend that everyone else in the entire world is crammed into that theater watching the movie, pick out the one person out of all of them who disliked the movie the most, and speak for them with the most eloquent words possible. A critic who enjoys anything he watches has not seen enough movies and is not doing his job properly."

—From a speech class presentation entitled "A Critique of Critics"

"If you wanna be a genius, it's easy! All you gotta say is 'Everything stinks,' then you're never wrong."

—Wilbur Cobb, The Ren and Stimpy Show, "Stimpy's Cartoon"

"No News... is good news"

—Anonymous

"For fans, we sure do complain a LOT, don't we?"

—Anonymous

"We are also not a wiki for bashing things. Once again, we're about celebrating fiction, not showing off how snide and sarcastic we can be."

—The TV Tropes Home Page

"Is that how we critique movies nowadays? By just ranting and nitpicking about all the individual moments we hated?"

—James Rolfe, "Top 10 Sequels That Aren’t As Bad As Everyone Says"

"I need to stand on a rake or fall in a vat of sheep excrement for there to be something to write about each month. Good news, frankly, is dull."

—Jeremy Clarkson, Top Gear