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Who really said it

There is nothing quite so tragic as a young cynic, because it means the person has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing

Spoken by Maya Angelou 1928–2014 · American memoirist and poet
Verified In copyright

Angelou said this on camera in Facing Evil, the Bill Moyers PBS documentary broadcast on 28 March 1988, speaking to the symposium on evil the programme filmed in Salado, Texas. The transcript published on billmoyers.com ↗ carries this exact wording, and Quote Investigator ↗ reaches the same conclusion, recommending the 1988 version over the variant that later entered circulation.

Last verified 29 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Verified quote & credit

“There is nothing quite so tragic as a young cynic, because it means the person has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing” There is nothing quite so tragic as a young cynic, because it means the person has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing. — Maya Angelou, speaking in the PBS documentary "Facing Evil," broadcast 28 March 1988. Verified at quotle.info

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by The Estate of Maya Angelou (her spoken words); the broadcast transcript as published by billmoyers.com). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

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In context

Evoking the world of Maya Angelou — American memoirist, poet and civil rights activist. Theme: "There is nothing quite so tragic as a young cynic, because it means the person has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

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Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "There is nothing quite so tragic as a young cynic, because it means the person has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

The source

Programme
Facing Evil
Broadcast
PBS, 28 March 1988 — a Bill Moyers special; produced and directed by David Grubin (Public Affairs Television/KERA-Dallas)
Speaker
Maya Angelou, addressing the Facing Evil symposium in Salado, Texas, filmed for Bill Moyers’ PBS documentary
Also in print
Facing Evil: Light at the Core of Darkness (Open Court, 1988)

So out of this evil, which was a dire kind of evil, because rape on the body of a young person more often than not introduces cynicism, and there is nothing quite so tragic as a young cynic, because it means the person has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing. Facing Evil, PBS, 28 March 1988

Angelou’s own sentence, as transcribed on billmoyers.com. The famous quotation is the second half of it; the first half is what she is actually talking about.

Broadcast transcript
Read the 28 March 1988 transcript
Facing Evil — full transcript on billmoyers.com

How the line travelled

  • 28 March 1988 — Angelou speaks the sentence on camera in Facing Evil, the Bill Moyers PBS special produced and directed by David Grubin. Moyers’ own site publishes the transcript of the broadcast ↗, which carries the wording verbatim.
  • 1988 — the symposium volume Facing Evil: Light at the Core of Darkness, edited by Paul Woodruff and Harry A. Wilmer for Open Court (Open Library record ↗), prints an edited transcript of Angelou’s remarks, according to Quote Investigator ↗.
  • 1997 — Simpson’s Contemporary Quotations logs the line under “Maya Angelou poet” with the source line “PBS 28 Mar 88” — but with “tragic” swapped for “pitiful,” as Quote Investigator documents ↗.
  • Today — Wikiquote ↗ still carries the “pitiful” variant sourced to a 2005 anthology, while Quote Investigator recommends the 1988 spoken version. That is the version quoted at the top of this page.
In copyright

These words were spoken in 1988 and the transcript was published from that broadcast, so nothing here is in the public domain in the United States — work first published in 1931 or later is presumptively still protected. Quote the sentence briefly and with attribution; do not reproduce the transcript at length.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

What goes wrong with this one

The attribution is right — unusually, for a famous Angelou line. What circulates wrongly is the wording, and the source most people reach for.

“There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic…” variant

A reworded form — “nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing” — entered the reference books. Quote Investigator ↗ records it in Simpson’s Contemporary Quotations (1997), notes that “tragic” had been changed to “pitiful,” and recommends using the 1988 spoken version instead.

A 2005 quotation anthology weak citation

Wikiquote ↗ lists the “pitiful” variant sourced to The Truth in Words (2005) by Neal Zero — an anthology, not the original. Citing a quote book instead of the broadcast is how a well-documented line still ends up looking unverifiable.

Unsourced quote cards and image macros context stripped

Shared as a standalone aphorism, the sentence reads like generic uplift. In the actual transcript ↗ it sits inside Angelou’s account of surviving childhood rape, which is what the remark is about.

The line is genuinely Angelou’s, spoken on camera in Facing Evil, broadcast 28 March 1988 — and the words at the top of this page are what she actually said, per the broadcast transcript ↗.

Context

Why she said it

The setting was not a greeting card. Facing Evil was a 1988 PBS documentary built around a Salado, Texas conference on how people live with evil, and Angelou was telling that room about being raped as a child and the years of silence that followed. Reading and learning, she said, were what carried her through — and the line about the young cynic is her account of what she thinks she narrowly escaped.

That is the part the quote-card version loses. Angelou is not making a general remark about kids these days; she is describing a specific fork in the road for someone whose trust has been broken early, and arguing that cynicism only looks like wisdom because it arrives at the same shrug from the opposite direction.

“from knowing nothing to believing nothing”

Why this one is unusual

Most viral Angelou lines fail the first test: no book, no speech, no date. This one passes it twice over — the broadcast transcript is online with a date on it, and the compilers noticed early. When Simpson’s Contemporary Quotations picked the line up in 1997, its source line read simply “PBS 28 Mar 88,” as Quote Investigator records ↗.

The one thing that did drift was a single adjective. If you have seen the sentence with “pitiful” where this page has “tragic,” you have seen the reference-book version rather than the spoken one.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Hope Growth Doubt Character

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Investigator: the full investigationquoteinvestigator.com

Garson O’Toole traces the line to the 1988 Facing Evil broadcast, logs the later reference-book entries, and concludes Angelou deserves the credit.
“Facing Evil” — broadcast transcriptbillmoyers.com

The primary source: Bill Moyers’ own site publishes the 28 March 1988 transcript, in which Angelou speaks the sentence word for word.
Maya Angelou on Wikiquoteen.wikiquote.org

Carries the “nothing so pitiful” variant in its Quotes section, sourced only to a 2005 quotation compilation rather than to the broadcast.
Maya Angelou — biographyen.wikipedia.org

Life dates (4 April 1928 – 28 May 2014), her birth name, and an overview of her memoirs, poetry and activism.
Facing Evil: Light at the Core of Darknessarchive.org

Catalogue record for the 1988 Open Court volume edited by Paul Woodruff and Harry A. Wilmer, drawn from the 1987 Salado symposium on understanding evil.
Facing Evil — Open Library recordopenlibrary.org

A second bibliographic record confirming the book’s title, editors and 1988 first publication.

The author

Who said it

Maya Angelou

1928–2014 · American memoirist, poet and civil rights activist

Born Marguerite Annie Johnson in 1928, Maya Angelou became one of America’s most widely read memoirists with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), which follows her life up to the age of seventeen. She worked as a dancer, singer, screenwriter, director and university professor, and was active in the civil rights movement. Her name is now one of the internet’s favourite hooks for unsourced inspirational lines — which makes the ones that do have a date and a tape worth marking clearly.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Chicago

Maya Angelou, speaking in "Facing Evil," a Bill Moyers special, PBS, broadcast March 28, 1988; transcript published at billmoyers.com. Her remarks were printed as "That Which Lives After Us" in Paul Woodruff and Harry A. Wilmer, eds., Facing Evil: Light at the Core of Darkness (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1988), 22.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘There is nothing quite so tragic as a young cynic, because it means the person has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing’?” Last verified 29 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/there-is-nothing-quite-so-tragic-as-a-young-cynic-because/

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