65 Bad News Quotes On Success In Life

These bad news quotes will inspire you. Bad news is any news that drastically, negatively, and seriously affects an individual’s view of their future.

Below you will find a collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging bad news quotes, bad news sayings, and bad news proverbs.

Best Bad News Quotes

1. “The brains of humans contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
2. “Better to have bad news that’s true than good news we made up” ~ Eric Ries
3. “Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.” ~ Douglas Adams
4. “Never awake me when you have good news to announce, because with good news nothing presses; but when you have bad news, arouse me immediately, for then there is not an instant to be lost.” ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

5. “Bad news isn’t wine. It doesn’t improve with age.” ~ Colin Powell

6. “The good news is that Jesus is praying for us. The bad news is that we are going to need it!” ~ John Wimber
7. “Bad news sells because the amygdala is always looking for something to fear.” ~ Peter Diamandis
8. “Bad news travels fast. Good news takes the scenic route.” ~ Doug Larson
9. “Headlines, in a way, are what mislead you because bad news is a headline, and gradual improvement is not.” ~ Bill Gates

10. “Though it be honest, it is never good to bring bad news.” ~ William Shakespeare

11. “In the business world, bad news is usually good news – for somebody else.” ~ James Surowiecki
12. “I’d rather get bad news from an honest man than lies from a flatterer.” ~ Ursula K. Le Guin
13. “Sometimes, I think my most important job as a CEO is to listen for bad news. If you don’t act on it, your people will eventually stop bringing bad news to your attention and that is the beginning of the end.” ~ Bill Gates
14. “The good news about computers is that they do what you tell them to do. The bad news is that they do what you tell them to do.” ~ Ted Nelson

15. “Quit sharing bad news and gossip you aren’t a garbage truck.” ~ Grant Cardone

16. “bad news travels faster than good.” ~ Catherine the Great
17. “More bad news for the Taliban. Remember how they are promised 72 virgins when they die? Turns out that it’s only one 72-year-old virgin.” ~ Jay Leno
18. “You are powerful. Sorry. Hate to be the bearer of bad news. You are. You can continue arm wrestling with yourself, or you can use both arms, your whole heart, and all your strength to wrestle with greatness. The choice is yours.” ~ Peter McWilliams , Bearer of bad news quotes
19. “When you’re expecting bad news you have to be prepared for it a long time ahead so that when the telegram comes you can already pronounce the syllables in your mouth before opening it.” ~ Robert Pinget

20. “The good news is hopeful doesn’t mean dumb. The bad news is cynical doesn’t mean smart.” ~ Sarah Silverman

21. “More information is always better than less. When people know the reason things are happening, even if it’s bad news, they can adjust their expectations and react accordingly. Keeping people in the dark only serves to stir negative emotions.” ~ Simon Sinek
22. “Oxytocin is a Teflon hormone – bad news rolls off it.” ~ Robert M. Sapolsky
23. “Bad news has never been broken gently in my family. Because, breaking it gently takes a few extra seconds. And who’s got that kinda time? Hey, we maybe failures, but we are very busy.” ~ Christopher Titus
24. “For a long period of time, the media covered rap music and hip hop the same way they cover a lot of black people, people of color, you know, the bad news happens to be news. They used to have these little stupid colloquialisms that pop up like, “You know what? No news is bad news!” They trick the masses into thinking that any news is great for you. And I just think that’s a piece of crap.” ~ Chuck D

25. “Bad news travels at the speed of light; good news travels like molasses.” ~ Tracy Morgan

26. “The bad news is that ignoring the performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front of their eyes. Ignoring gets you a whole way out there. The good news is that by simply looking at something that somebody has done, scanning it and saying “Uh huh,” that seems to be quite sufficient to dramatically improve people’s motivations.” ~ Dan Ariely , Good news bad news quotes
27. “Each stage of development, remember, has a dialectic of progress–in plain language, every new development is good news, bad news.” ~ Ken Wilber
28. “Good news is only really good to those directly involved. Most people lead such futile and useless lives that only bad news makes them feel better. If not better, certainly gooder. If one cannot gain recognition for anything else, he can rest well with the assurance that he is “good”, which in most case equates with “right”.” ~ Anton Szandor LaVey

29. “Tell your husbands any bad news when everything is calm, not just as they come through the door.” ~ Indra Devi

30. “We’d already lost the possibility of stopping global warming entirely. That hasn’t been in the cards for a long time. The triumph of Trump probably means that we’re not going to be able to stop it at the two-degree mark that the world had been aiming for. That’s very bad news, mostly because the planet seems to be more sensitive than we thought to even small increases in temperature.” ~ Bill McKibben
31. “The good news may be that Nature is phasing out the white man, but the bad news is that’s who She thinks we all are.” ~ Alice Walker
32. “The good news is your surgery was a success and now you look like a movie star! The bad news is that movie star is Drew Carey!” ~ Ryan Stiles
33. “Newsmen winding up the nation, a little bad news helps circulation, pass on the panic to the population.” ~ Ray Davies
34. “The bad news is that Iran wants to talk about everything except their nuclear program. They want to talk about regional cooperation, they want to talk about the sanctions issues, and it seems like the western powers want to talk about nothing more than the nuclear issue.” ~ Reza Aslan

35. “The good news is, we’re not bankrupt. The bad news is, we’re close.” ~ Richard Codey

36. “So here you are, in your twenties, thinking that you’ll have another 40 years to go. Four decades in which to live long and prosper.Bad news. Read the papers. There are people dropping dead when they’re 50, 40, 30 years old. Or quite possibly just after finishing their convocation. They would be very disappointed that they didn’t meet their life expectancy.I’m here to tell you this. Forget about your life expectancy.” ~ Adrian Tan , Bad news quotes life
37. “Bad news drives out good news. The irrational is more controversial than the rational. Concurrence can no longer compete with dissent. One minute of Eldridge Cleaver is worth ten minutes of Roy Wilkins. The labor crises settled at the negotiating table is nothing compared to the confrontation that results in a strike … normality has become the nemesis of network news.” ~ Spiro T. Agnew
38. “It is funny, I don’t feel old enough to give advice… But with the advisers you trust, you better listen to them. It may be bad news but that’s the only way you’re going to improve.” ~ Ben Heppner
39. “Everything in my life is in perspective. OK, perspective ebbs and flows. I’ve had bad days, but they weren’t in the last years. A bad day is 2 October 1996: ‘We’ve got bad news for you, you’ve got advanced testicular cancer and you’ve got a coin’s toss chance of survival.’ That’s a bad day.” ~ Lance Armstrong

40. “People do not like to have their favorite myths of idols challenged and as a rule I think that the public does not like bad news.” ~ Tom Brokaw

41. “I tried for the longest time to find out what deconstructionism was. Nobody was able to explain it to me clearly. The best answer I got was from a writer, who said, ‘Honey, it’s bad news for you and me.” ~ Margaret Atwood
42. “What can I do to see Reality as it is?” The master smiled and said, “I have good news and bad news for you, my friend.” “What’s the bad news?” “There’s nothing you can do to see it is a gift.” “And what’s the good news?” “There’s nothing you can do to see it is a gift.” ~ Anthony de Mello
43. “I have got this letter which actually goes out the day after I die. It has already been written. And it says that: “Yesterday I died”. And then it says: “That’s bad news for me, but it’s not bad news for you, the shareholders of Berkshire”. And then I go on and explain what is going to happen. I know that is one time when they will be really interested in hearing from me.” ~ Warren Buffett
44. “The investment business has taught me – increasingly as the years have passed – that people, especially investors (and, I believe, Americans), prefer good news and wishful thinking to bad news; and that there are always vested interests to offer facile, optimistic alternatives to the bad news.” ~ Jeremy Grantham

45. “Bosses and leaders everywhere should cherish the people who bring them bad news, disappointing data or hard problems.” ~ Margaret Heffernan

46. “I think of bad news as a huge bird, with the wings of a crow and the face of my Grade Four school teacher, sparse bun, rancid teeth, wrinkly frown, pursed mouth and all, sailing around the world under cover of darkness pleased to be the bearer of ill tidings, carrying a basket of rotten eggs, and knowing- as the sun comes up- exactly where to drop them. On me, for one.” ~ Margaret Atwood
47. “But there’s a reason we recognize Hamlet as a masterpiece: it’s that Shakespeare told us the truth, and people so rarely tell us the truth in this rise and fall here [indicates blackboard]. The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut
48. “Today they have proven once again that the mainstream media can’t print enough bad news about our troops.” ~ Joe Scarborough
49. “I mean, the idea that Bar could have sent him off on a Grand Tour. But he wasn’t the least bit interested. Why? Why isn’t he interested in the world? Because here’s the bad news for him: He’s in the world now.” ~ Chris Matthews

50. “Republicans have to be relieved. Given all the bad news this White House has faced, at least the president’s hemorrhaging has stopped.” ~ Stuart Rothenberg

51. “Ideological warriors whether from the Left or the Right are bad news for the bench. They tend to make law, not interpret law. And that’s not what any of us should want from our judges.” ~ Charles Schumer
52. “And when that bad news washes over you and that pain sponges in, I just hope you feel like you’ve always got two choices.  One, you can swirl and twirl and gloom and doom forever.  Or two, you can grieve, and then face the future with newly sober eyes.” ~ Neil Pasricha
53. “There are no secrets on an successful software project. Both good and bad news must be able to move up and down the ptoject hierarchy without restriction.” ~ Steve McConnell
54. “I do miss Glasgow but Malibu is home now. I love it here and when I do go back to Scotland it takes me a bit of time to acclimatise. I am a spoilt so-and-so. I live in the mountains of Malibu in the most gorgeous house and I phone my mum every day and tell her that I have got bad news – that it is only 70 degrees here.” ~ Tommy Flanagan

55. “If you’ve got bad news, you want to kick them blues, cocaine.” ~ J.J. Cale

56. “Listening to his songs she heard nothing but bad news, still she made her mind up to try to get him win or lose.” ~ Waylon Jennings
57. “A man goes to the doctor for a check, and the doctor exams him and says I’ve got bad news, you’ve got cancer and alzheimers. The man goes Thank god I don’t have cancer.” ~ Gilbert Gottfried
58. “Bad news is just an excuse.” ~ Neil Young
59. “One of the most persistent cultural tics of the early 21st century is Americans’ reluctance to absorb, let alone prepare for, bad news.” ~ Frank Rich

60. “So, good news/bad news: good news that I’m progressing; bad news that life is short and art is long.” ~ George Saunders

61. “We cannot truly plan, because we do not understand the future-but this is not necessarily a bad news. We could plan while bearing in mind such limitations. It just takes guts.” ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb
62. “People who travel in China tell me that the mood there is still very upbeat, because their media is different from our media. Chinese media emphasize how well things are going and suppress the bad news and publish the good news.” ~ Freeman Dyson
63. “The good news is we had this idea of cloud computing. The bad news is we were 10 years too early.” ~ Marc Andreessen
64. “I think when tragic things happen it is on surface. It is like the ocean. One the surface a waves and sometimes the wave is very serious and strong. But it comes and goes, comes and goes, and underneath, the ocean always remains calm. Tibetans have a saying: “If bad news comes to you listen here” (points to the right ear) “and let it our here” (points to the left ear).” ~ Dalai Lama
65. “So, I am a b*stard, and the English are b*stards. But the really bad news is that you are too. My vision of Europe would be Europe of b*stards for whom the question of legitimacy was a site of endless struggle and contestation.” ~ Simon Critchley

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