Only a bitter little adolescent boy could confuse realism with pessimism.

A substantial amount of research over the past decade has reinforced the idea that although internal happiness can deviate from its "resting state" in reaction to life events, it usually returns toward its baseline over time.

Optimism was for children. Once you reached adulthood then you had to join the rest of the world as a realist - life was a bag of shit you were expected to pay for.

In practice nobody cares if work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable. In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except " Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it"? Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised.

We will not be dictated to by men with less intelligence, energy, initiative and ambition than we ourselves possess.

Sometimes I think that's the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead.