A pessimist is a person who has had to listen to too many optimists.

Marquis’s quip flips the usual moral hierarchy that treats optimism as inherently virtuous and pessimism as a personal failing. Here, pessimism is recast as a social reaction: the pessimist isn’t simply gloomy, but exhausted by relentless, perhaps naïve cheerleading. The joke implies that some optimism can be performative, repetitive, or dismissive of real difficulties—so much so that it produces its opposite. In a broader sense, the line satirizes the culture of compulsory positivity and suggests that skepticism may arise from experience with overconfident promises rather than from temperament alone.