"If you expect the worst from a person, you can't ever be disappointed. Only the disappointed resort to violence. The pessimist, which is another way of saying the Augustinian, takes a sort of gloomy pleasure in observing the depths to which human behaviour can sink. The more sin he sees, the more his belief in Original Sin is confirmed. Everyone likes to have his deepest convictions confirmed; that is one of the most abiding of human satisfactions."
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Sources
Anthony Burgess, in The Wanting Seed, p. 11 (1962)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Pessimism
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Pessimism
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