Absurd Quotes - Page 14

• We have to stop arresting prostitutes and not arresting traffickers and pimps. It's absurd. We're arresting the victim or the survivor and not the oppressor.

  Gloria Steinem

  Pimp, Survivor, Victim

  Interview with Max Miller, bigthink.com. October 28, 2010.

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• The idea of hereditary legislators is as inconsistent as that of hereditary judges, or hereditary juries; and as absurd as an hereditary mathematician, or an hereditary wise man; and as ridiculous as an hereditary poet-laureat.

  Thomas Paine

  Wise, Men, Ideas

  The Rights of Man pt. 1 (1791)

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• There can be no question of masking the evidence, of suppressing the absurd by denying one of the terms of its equation. It is essential to know whether one can live with it or whether, on the other hand, logic commands one to die of it.

  Albert Camus

  Hands, Essentials, Logic

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays”, p.50, Vintage

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• A flatterer never seems absurd: The flatter'd always takes his word.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Humorous, Flattery, Seems

  Benjamin Franklin (2004). “Poor Richard's Almanack”, p.84, Barnes & Noble Publishing

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• Can an idea a notion as abstract as Relativism produce by itself the effects alleged? cause all the harm, destroy all the lives and reputations? I am as far as anyone can be from denying the power of ideas in history, but the suggestion that a philosophy (as Relativism is often called) has perverted millions and debased daily life is on the face of it absurd. No idea working alone has ever demoralized society, and there have been plenty of ideas simpler and more exciting than Relativism.

  Jacques Barzun

  Philosophy, Ideas, Working Alone

  Jacques Barzun (1989). “The Culture We Deserve”, p.89, Wesleyan University Press

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• A person is not a democrat thanks to his ignorance of literature and the arts, nor an elitist because he or she has cultivated them. The possession of knowledge makes for unjust power over others only if used for that very purpose: a physician or lawyer or clergyman can exploit or humiliate others, or he can be a humanitarian and a benefactor. In any case, it is absurd to conjure up behind anybody who exploits his educated status the existence of an "elite" scheming to oppress the rest of us.

  Jacques Barzun

  Art, Ignorance, Physicians

  "Exeunt the Humanities". Essay by Jacques Barzun (1980) published in his book "The Culture We Deserve" (p. 117), 1989.

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• It is unjust and absurd of those advancing in years, to expect of the young that confidence should come all and only on their side: the human heart, at whatever age, opens only to the heart that opens in return.

  Maria Edgeworth

  Heart, Years, Age

  Maria Edgeworth (1855). “Tales and Novels: The absentee (concluded) Madame de Fleury. Emilie de Coulanges. The modern Griselda”, p.62

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• Poetry is a bad medium for philosophy. Everything in the philosophical poem has to satisfy irreconcilable requirements: for instance, the last demand that we should make of philosophy (that it be interesting) is the first we make of a poem; the philosophical poet has an elevated and methodical, but forlorn and absurd air as he works away at his flying tank, his sewing-machine that also plays the piano.

  Randall Jarrell

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Air

  "Poetry and the Age" by Randall Jarrell, Vintage paperback, (p. 127), 1955.

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• National Socialism is what Marxism might have been if it could have broken its absurd and artificial ties with a democratic order.

  Adolf Hitler

  Order, Ties, Broken

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• In particular, it is absurd to hope to banish envy of other people's possessions or fortunes, if only because the spirit of envy can lead to emulation and ambition and have positive consequences.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Ambition, People, Envy

  Christopher Hitchens (2011). “God is Not Great”, p.74, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• There are strange flowers of reason to match each error of the senses. Admirable gardens of absurd beliefs, forebodings, obsessions and frenzies. Unknown, ever-changing gods take shape there.

  Louis Aragon

  Flower, Garden, Errors

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• I must confess that I and a few others are burdened with heavy responsibilities regarding the future of criticism. I am certainly, if not the inventor, then at least one of the first systematizers of an absurd critical practice that, as soon as it had peeked its beak out of the nest, flapping its new wet wings, took flight in the minds of the young, becoming a wild ox and sowing avant-garde literature with the mighty tomes of what might as well be called the abstract bear.

  Louis Aragon

  Responsibility, Practice, Wings

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• To suppose that man without language taught himself to speak, seems to me as absurd as it would be to suppose that without legs he could teach himself to walk. Language, therefore, must have been the immediate gift of God.

  Noah Webster

  Men, Would Be, Legs

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• Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one. What is most repellent in the System of Nature - after the recipe for making eels from flour - is the audacity with which it decides that there is no God, without even having tried the impossibility. If God did not exist, he would have to be invented." But all nature cries aloud that he does exist: that there is a supreme intelligence, an immense power, an admirable order, and everything teaches us our own dependence on it.

  Baron d'Holbach

  Order, Eels, Doubt

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• Nor, in truth, is it of little importance to prevent the suspicion of any difference having arisen between us from being handed down in any way to our posterity; for it is worse than absurd that parties should be found disagreeing on the very principles, after we have been compelled to make our departure from the world.

  John Calvin

  Party, Differences, Departure

  Letter to Philip Melanchthon, November 28, 1552.

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• All his leisure clothes were absurd - jokes, really - as though leisure itself had to be ridiculed.

  Edmund White

  Clothes, Leisure, Jokes

  Edmund White (2016). “A Boy's Own Story: Picador Classic”, p.10, Pan Macmillan

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• I'm a good example of wanting to apologize only for my precise share of a problem--as I calculate it, of course--and I expect my husband Steve to apologize for his share, also as I calculate it. Since we're not always of one mind on the math, it can lead to the theater of the absurd.

  Harriet Lerner

  Husband, Math, Mind

  "Waiting For An Apology? Don’t Hold Your Breath" by Harriet Lerner, www.huffingtonpost.com. January 5, 2012.

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• From the fame opinion of a soul distinct from the body came the practice of praying, first for the dead, and then to them with a long train of other absurd opinions, and superstitious practices.

  Joseph Priestley

  Practice, Long, Soul

  Joseph Priestley (1782). “An History of the Corruption of Christianity”, p.442

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• If an art has for its function to represent manners and people, I do not see how it can avoid systematizing its sensibility to the extent of showing some figures much as Molière, for instance, did, as absurd or detestable.

  Wyndham Lewis

  Art, People, Manners

  Wyndham Lewis (1929). “The Diabolical Principle and The Dithyrambic Spectator”, p.38, Ardent Media

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• The nonsense about President Obama being a Muslim has got to stop. I rise to defend him from this absurd accusation by pointing out that he is obviously an atheist.

  Ann Coulter

  Atheist, President, Nonsense

  "Obama is Not a Muslim". townhall.com. September 1, 2010.

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• The idea of an isolated American painting , so popular in this country during the thirties, seems absurd to me, just as the idea of a purely American mathematics or physics would seem absurd... And in another sense, the problem doesn't exist at all; or, if it did, would solve itself: An American is an American and his painting would naturally be qualified by the fact, whether he wills or not. But the basic problems of contemporary painting are independent of any one country.

  Jackson Pollock

  Country, Independent, Ideas

  Jackson Pollock (1958). “Jackson Pollock, 1912-1956”

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• Lovemaking seems all too absurd when described.

  Dan Simmons

  Seems

  Dan Simmons (2014). “The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle: Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, The Rise of Endymion”, p.2518, Spectra

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• The day will come, sooner or later, when people will wonder at the necessity of taking all this trouble to expose the folly of a system, so childish and absurd, and yet so often enforced at the point of a bayonet.

  Jean-Baptiste Say

  People, Bayonets, Wonder

  Jean Baptiste Say, Clement Cornell Biddle (1851). “A treatise on political economy”, p.159

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• I endorse without reserve the much-abused sentiment of Gov. M'Duffie, that "slavery is the corner stone of our Republican edifice;" while I repudiate, as ridiculously absurd, that much-lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson, that "all men are born equal.

  James Henry Hammond

  Men, Slavery, Stones

  James Henry Hammond (1866). “Selections from the Letters and Speeches of the Hon. James H. Hammond: Of South Carolina”, p.126

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• Art and work and art and life are very connected and my whole life has been absurd. There isn't a thing in my life that has happened that hasn't been extreme - personal health, family, economic situations...absurdity is the key word.

  Eva Hesse

  Art, Keys, Economic

  "Art since 1940, strategies of being". Book by Jonathan Fineberg, copyright Prentice Hall, Inc., 1995.

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