'The professional pessimist sees one half of the picture, the professional optimist the other. The former calls the latter superficial and is in turn pronounced defeatist. Each possesses a distorted fragment of Christian truth. The Bible's realism exceeds that of the worst cynic, for it knows what man has done to God. At the same time its hope surpasses the wildest utopian fantasy, for it has concrete experience of what this same God will do for man.'
Edmond La B. Cherbonnier in Dick Keyes, Seeing through Cynicism: A Reconsideration of the Power of Suspicion, p.101.
