Absurd Quotes - Page 13

• To suppose that the eye could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree

  Charles Darwin

  Eye, Theory Of Evolution, Creation Science

  Charles Darwin (1861). “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection; Or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”, p.167

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• It's really absurd to make... a human image, with paint, today, when you think about it... But then all of a sudden, it was even more absurd not to do it.

  Willem de Kooning

  Thinking, Portraiture, Today

  Barbara Hess, Willem De Kooning (2004). “Willem de Kooning, 1904-1997: Content as a Glimpse”, p.33, Taschen

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• It's absurd to accuse Serbia and the Serbs for the armed secession of Croatia,.

  Slobodan Milosević

  Croatia, Secession, Serbia

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• When you think of painting as painting it is rather absurd. The real world is before us - glorious sunlight and activity and fresh air, and high speed motor cars and television, all the animation - a world apart from a little square of canvas that you smear paint on.

  Wayne Thiebaud

  Real, Thinking, Squares

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• Every beggar shall be arrested. But to arrest a beggar merely in order to put him in jail would be barbarous and absurd. He should be arrested for the sole purpose of teaching him how to earn a living by his work.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Teaching, Order, Jail

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• To ask me whether I could endure to live without friends is absurd. It is easy enough to live out of material sight of friends, but to live without human love is impossible.

  John Muir

  Friendship, Love Is, Sight

  John Muir, Peter Browning (1988). “John Muir, in His Own Words: A Book of Quotations”, p.26, Great West Books

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• A real liberated teacher never asks for a commitment from a student. That's absurd, a person wants to be there and they want to learn everything they can.

  Frederick Lenz

  Teacher, Real, Commitment

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• There's this absurd innate need in most men to feel that they're more powerful than women are, which is ridiculous.

  Frederick Lenz

  Powerful, Women, Enlightenment

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• The question is absurd: when you ask, 'If God is both all good and all powerful, why then does He allow suffering?', what you are really asking is, 'If God is both all good and all powerful, why then can He not make me (the questioner) - who is just as much a part of a universe in which there is suffering as is any other part - be at the same time the exact same questioner, but one who is now part and parcel of a universe in which there is no suffering?' Which, reduced down, is the same thing as asking, 'Why can there not be, at the same time, X and the preclusion of X?'

  Emo Philips

  Powerful, Asking Why, Suffering

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• To think that fulfilling yourself in this world will create eternal fulfillment is absurd. But we feel this way because we lack purity.

  Frederick Lenz

  Buddhism, Thinking, World

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• That we should have an agriculture based as much on petroleum as the soil-that we need petroleum exactly as much as we need food and must have it before we can eat-may seem absurd. It is absurd. It is nevertheless true.

  Wendell Berry

  Should Have, Land, Agriculture

  Wendell Berry (2015). “The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture”, p.37, Counterpoint

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• Whoever wants to reach socialism by any other path than that of political democracy will inevitably arrive at conclusions that are absurd and reactionary both in the economic and the political sense.

  Vladimir Lenin

  Political, Democracy, Want

  "Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution". "Collected Works", 9, Marxists, (p. 29), 1905.

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• There's something very sinister about a woman who is predatory but has an absurd voice working as a disservice to her.

  Claudia Black

  Voice, Sinister, Predatory

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• In Germany, we often hear the absurd complaint that museums don't have the money to buy paintings. Of course, I'm not talking about me and my paintings. There are, after all, more popular painters in this country.

  Georg Baselitz

  Country, Talking, Museums

  "My Paintings are Battles". Interview with Susanne Beyer, Ulrike Knöfel, www.spiegel.de. January 25, 2013.

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• In the world of 'Tim and Eric,' everything is big and ridiculous and absurd.

  Tim Heidecker

  Eric, World, Ridiculous

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• When I look back on my life nowadays, which I sometimes do, what strikes me most forcibly about it is that what seemed at the time most significant and seductive, seems now most futile and absurd. For instance, success in all of its various guises; being known and being praised; ostensible pleasures, like acquiring money or seducing women, or traveling, going to and fro in the world and up and down in it like Satan, exploring and experiencing whatever Vanity Fair has to offer. In retrospect all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called “licking the earth.

  Malcolm Muggeridge

  Exercise, Vanity, Self

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• Anarcho-capitalism, in my opinion, is a doctrinal system which, if ever implemented, would lead to forms of tyranny and oppression that have few counterparts in human history. There isn't the slightest possibility that its (in my view, horrendous) ideas would be implemented, because they would quickly destroy any society that made this colossal error. The idea of 'free contract' between the potentate and his starving subject is a sick joke, perhaps worth some moments in an academic seminar exploring the consequences of (in my view, absurd) ideas, but nowhere else.

  Noam Chomsky

  Errors, Views, Ideas

  "On Anarchism". Interview with Tom Lane, chomsky.info. December 23, 1996.

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• Instead of asking yourself whether you believe or not, ask yourself whether you have, this day, done one thing because He said, Do it! or once abstained because He said, Do not do it! It is simply absurd to say you believe, or even want to believe, in Him, if you do not do anything He tells you.

  George MacDonald

  Believe, Asking, Done

  George Macdonald (2012). “Unspoken Sermons Series I, II, and III”, p.212, Simon and Schuster

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• For many Americans, Osama bin Laden is the paradigmatic Muslim, an absurd conviction for anyone who has lived with Muslims.

  Miroslav Volf

  Osama Bin Laden, Conviction, Bin Laden

  "Did 9/11 Make Us Morally ‘Better’" by Miroslav Volf, www.huffingtonpost.com. September 7, 2011.

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• One of the things that sets the Bible apart from all other ancient religious writings is its scientific accuracy. Without exception, every other ancient religious writing contains certain scientific errors. For example, Muhammad taught in the Qur'an that the sun descends down into a muddy spring. The Hindu Vedas state that the Earth is flat and triangular, that earthquakes are caused by elephants shaking themselves under it. You'll never read absurd statements like those in the Bible.

  Charlie Campbell

  Bible, Religious, Spring

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• Hereditary succession to the magistracy is absurd, as it tends to make a property of it; it is incompatible with the sovereignty of the people.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  People, Sovereignty, Succession

  "Political Aphorisms, Moral and Philosophical Thoughts" collected and published by Cte. A. G. de Liancourt; edited by James Alexander Manning, (p. 246), 1848.

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• There is no such thing as a model or ideal Canadian. What could be more absurd than the concept of an "all Canadian" boy or girl? A society which emphasizes uniformity is one which creates intolerance and hate.

  Pierre Trudeau

  Girl, Hate, Boys

  Pierre Elliott Trudeau (1972). “Conversation with Canadians”

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• People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. They will practice Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen of diet, learn the literature of the whole world - all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their own souls.

  Carl Jung

  Yoga, Exercise, Order

  "Psychology and Alchemy". Book by Carl Jung. CW 12, par. 126, p. 99, 1952.

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• The present system of taking oaths is horrible. It is awfully absurd to make a man invoke God's wrath upon himself, if he speaks false; it is, in my judgment, a sin to do so.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Men, Wrath, Speak

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Henry Nelson Coleridge (1851). “Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge”, p.82

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• It's my greatest success. Women did not vote in Italy until 1946. A good friend and I put together a group of women to protest this. I was very young, just a girl. We went to the Viminale [home of the Ministry of the Interior] and spoke to the chair of the ministry board. Thanks to our initiative, we got the bureaucracy rolling on giving women the right to vote. I have to thank my father for this. He was in Geneva at the League of Nations, and women voted there. He thought it was absurd that women didn't vote in his country yet.

  Giovanna Cau

  Girl, Country, Father

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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