What American foreign policy needs is not a return to a narrow and cynical realism, but rather the formulation of a "realistic Wilsonianism" that better matches means to ends.

Firewater's leader, Tod A., writes pop songs with the cynical realism of the Ashcan School; his dank rasp makes him convincing when he sings, "I have crawled broke and desperate through the dumpsters of the Lord."

Through this idea, it is possible to see a bridge between the mystical simplicity of Taoism and the cynical realism of Legalism.

They involved a retreat from the public sphere, differing from political pop and cynical realism.

Firewater's leader, Tod A., writes pop songs with the cynical realism of the Ashcan School and sings in a dank rasp.

The comrades Honecker, Zhivkov, and above all, Ceauşescu himself, still lived in a mental world shaped by both Stalin's dreams and his cynical realism.

Both espouse a kind of cynical "realism" that is in fact a variety of racist guilt.

Music analyst Clifford Bartlett writes that "Monteverdi's glorious music goes beyond Busenello's cynical realism, and presents human behaviour in a better light".

It took several seconds for John to grasp the implication; he only did so then because the remark came from Pirrie and so could be founded only on an utterly cynical realism.

As a thinking man, Brunetti reads Cicero for moral direction, looks to his wife for doses of cynical realism and humbly consults his secretary, the terrifyingly efficient Signorina Elettra, on practical matters.