What is "cynical"

Usage examples of "cynical".

Nil admirari is very well for a North American Indian and his degenerate successor, who has grown too grand to admire anything but himself, and takes a cynical pride in his stolid indifference to everything worth reverencing or honoring.

Bethel knew that Andrew Deacon was as young as she, and as armourless against a cynical world.

I said, not with clairvoyant insight but with a cynical surety that human nature had been no different-or better-tens of thousands of years ago than it was in our own age.

For had King Charles not been duplicitous, had Prestcott not been a fanatic, had Thurloe not been concerned for his own safety, had Wallis not been vain and cruel, had Bristol not been ambitious, had Bennet not been cynical, had government, in sum, not been government and politicians not what they are, then Sarah Blundy would not have been led to the scaffold and the sacrifice would not have been made.

As he reviewed the conversation of the evening, he wondered which were really the more dangerous to the state, Emmet, full of personal grievances and undigested theories, or his opponent, Judge Swigart, the cynical and aristocratic politician.

This is why, to the cynical newcomer or fresh Ennet House resident, serious AAs look like these weird combinations of Gandhi and Mr.

It was imperative that no one recognize the face of Jeremiah Freel, which stared out from so many wanted posters in so many post offices that it had actually been made into a poster, popular in the dorm rooms of cynical college students.

I have often spent the night rambling about with him, and I was amazed at his cynical boldness and impudence.

Flicking through the screens, he forgot, by degrees, his cynical appraisal of Huo, and his thoughts chased the implications of what he was reading, like pieces chasing down the king on a chessboard.

By his brooding on the perpetual failure, not only of others, but of himself, to live up to his imaginative ideals, his consequent cynical scorn for humanity, the jejune credulity as to the absolute validity of his ideals and the unworthiness of the world in disregarding them, his wincings and mockeries under the sting of the petty disillusions which every hour spent among men brings to his infallibly quick observation, he has acquired the half tragic, half ironic air, the mysterious moodiness, the suggestion of a strange and terrible history that has left him nothing but undying remorse, by which Childe Harold fascinated the grandmothers of his English contemporaries.

Austra happened to be so cynical, how fairly the judgments of his justicer were arrived at.

CHAPTER XXIV THE DUEL Cleggett took Wilton Barnstable by the sleeve and drew him towards Loge, who, still seated on the deck with his long legs stretched out in front of him, was now yawning with a cynical affectation of boredom.

In almost every aspect of governmentfrom energy to military contracting to environmental protection to health careyou find the exact same kind of cynical looting and betrayal of the public good.

A woolly-haired adolescent boy wrapped in a superior and cynical cloud of pride, this one, in a floral mumu and Spandex bloomers, Runciter had never encountered before.

The cynical, contemptuous Brian Neame had caught the malady of the times: patriotism, for him, was archaic.