Absurd Quotes - Page 24

• It is false to believe that the sun revolves around the earth, but it is not absurd.

  Terry Eagleton

  Believe, Earth, Sun

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• I like "God Give Me the Strength" very much. It's not really a blues and to call it a ballad is absurd. I don't know, its mid-tempo. Mark (St. John) actually wrote it and I think its very telling of our lives in the 60s. Its just a good song, ya know.

  Dick Taylor

  Song, Thinking, Giving

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• This visa-waiver thing is absurd. Has anybody in the West been targeted by any Iranian national, anybody of Iranian origin, or anyone travelling to Iran? Whereas many people have been targeted by the nationals of your allies, people visiting your allies, and people transiting the territory of, again, your allies. So you're looking at the wrong address.

  Mohammad Javad Zarif

  Iran, People, Addresses

  "Iran's Javad Zarif on Syria, Russia, and Donald Trump". Interview with Robin Wright, www.newyorker.com. December 18, 2015.

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• Usually at the core of fiction that has some element of the absurd there tends to be an examination of some societal ills that we should talk about more than we do. And it's funny, of course, so we have that release valve with absurdism. It offers us a safe way to explore difficult subject matter.

  Laurie Foos

  Fiction, Elements, Examination

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I had/have a habit of sending books out before they're ready. And then I edit with almost absurd intensity. But I've done about a book a year.

  Shane McCrae

  Book, Years, Done

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Yeah I live of my music. Why does everyone ask me that? Is my music that absurd that nobody could possibly be buying it?

  Venetian Snares

  Doe, Buying, Yeah

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• All this argument is the temperature going up or not, it's absurd. Of course it's going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we're coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we're putting more carbon dioxide into the air.

  Reid Bryson

  Air, Ice, Age

  "Climate Momentum Shifting: Prominent Scientists Reverse Belief in Man-made Global Warming - Now Skeptics" by Marc Morano, www.epw.senate.gov. May 15, 2007.

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• A man of the best parts and greatest learning, if he does not know the world by his own experience and observation, will be very absurd, and consequently very unwelcome in company. He may say very good things; but they will be probably so ill-timed, misplaced, or improperly addressed, that he had much better hold his tongue.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Men, Doe, World

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• Every sensible man, every honorable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror." "Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion that has ever infected the world." "Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and common sense." "If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities.

  Voltaire

  Christian, Believe, Men

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• The book of Genesis, a farrago of nonsense so wholly absurd that even Sunday-school scholars have to be threatened with Hell to make them accept it.

  H. L. Mencken

  Book, School, Sunday

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.202, Vintage

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• I constantly saw the false and the bad, and finally the absurd and the senseless, standing in universal admiration and honour.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Saws, Admiration, Honour

  Arthur Schopenhauer (2012). “The World as Will and Representation”, p.18, Courier Corporation

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• Every man knows about a particular body part that often seems to have a mind of its own. And every woman knows how absurd men become when that is the body part they allow to influence their choices and decisions.

  Neale Donald Walsch

  Men, Choices, Decision

  Neale Donald Walsch (2011). “Conversations with God, Book 3: Embracing the Love of the Universe (Anniv)”, p.185, Hampton Roads Publishing

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• . . . an absurd problem came to the surface: 'How COULD God permit that (crucifixion of Jesus Christ)!' . . . the deranged reason of the little community found quite a frightfully absurd answer: God gave his Son for forgiveness, as a SACRIFICE . . . The SACRIFICE FOR GUILT, and just in its most repugnant and barbarous form - the sacrifice of the innocent for the sins of the guilty! What horrifying heathenism!

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Jesus, Son, Sacrifice

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• I would caution my Republican friends that [Obama has] three years to go, and in that three years the American people are going to want to see some progress and not just claims that this guy is out of office and we're going to do everything to destroy him or that somehow he is a 'socialist' taking over the country. Have we so lost our faith in this country that we think one person, one man can be can suddenly change our entire system? That's kind of absurd.

  Colin Powell

  Country, Men, Thinking

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• I am not haunted by memories of Vietnam. But I must admit I never thought we would again witness in my lifetime the specter of politicians picking targets and ruling out offensive measures in the absurd hope that the enemy would respond to our restraint by yielding to our demands.

  John McCain

  Memories, Enemy, Target

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• But, as Douglas E Harding has pointed out, we tend to think of this planet as a life-infested rock, which is as absurd as thinking of the human body as a cell infested skeleton. Surely all forms of life, including man, must be understood as "symptoms" of the earth, the solar system, and the galaxy in which case we cannot escape the conclusion that the galaxy is intelligent.

  Alan Watts

  Men, Thinking, Intelligent

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• My first feeling about the paper and the attitude is that it is absurd.

  Arthur Compton

  Attitude, Feelings, Paper

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• I don't think American family sitcoms are mean. I guess I really love 'Arrested Development.' I guess they are quite mean in that, but that is also a very silly, surreal, absurd show as well, and it has got a heart as well.

  Simon Bird

  Silly, Heart, Mean

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• Obama also allowed Hillary supporters to insert an absurd statement into the platform suggesting that media sexism spurred her loss and that “demeaning portrayals of women ... dampen the dreams of our daughters.” ... It would have been better to put this language in the platform: “A woman who wildly mismanages and bankrupts a quarter-of-a-billion-dollar campaign operation, and then blames sexism in society, will dampen the dreams of our daughters.”

  Maureen Dowd

  Dream, Daughter, Loss

  "Yes, She Can" by Maureen Dowd, www.nytimes.com. August 12, 2008.

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• A stronger race will drive out the weaker ones, for the vital urge in its ultimate form will break down the absurd barriers of the so called humanity of individuals to make way for the humanity of nature which destroys the weak to give their place to the strong.

  Adolf Hitler

  Strong, Race, Giving

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• Of course, there are also faculty who are discouraged from speaking critically about social issues because of the increasing assumption in American society that any form of critique which calls official power into question is somehow un-American. This absurd attempt to define any critique of official power as unpatriotic has a chilling effect on faculty, especially when such views and the names of the people to whom they are ascribed are widely disseminated in right-wing and dominant media outlets.

  Henry Giroux

  Names, Wings, Issues

  "Higher Education Under Attack: An Interview With Henry A. Giroux". Interview with C. Cryn Johannsen, www.truth-out.org. April 22, 2011.

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• Gore Vidal, Glenn Greenwald, Noam Chomsky, all these guys talk about how the United States became a national security state after World War II. I agree with that thesis. Essentially there's this bipartisan foreign policy elite who've been calling the shots for the last few decades and they're clearly still in control regardless of how clownish or absurd or stupid they demonstrate themselves to be. There's no shaking their orthodoxy.

  Michael Hastings

  Stupid, War, Guy

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The speaker tentatively reaches out with that feeling and realizes that it's kind of absurd, or at least a dangerous consolation, which is what I think is discovered as that longish sentence at the end of the poem comes to its conclusion. But here I am interpreting my own poem, which is kind of like making out with one's own high school yearbook photo.

  Matthew Zapruder

  School, Yearbook, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I wanted to literalize the surreal here. Those are my favorite kinds of stories. I love when Gabriel García Márquez does that, for instance - it adds to the joy, dares you to believe the unbelievable. And why not: so much of life is so dreamlike, so strange, so absurd.

  Porochista Khakpour

  Believe, Joy, Doe

  Source: therumpus.net

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• My god, people are selling their work and people are reading it! The horror! That MFA programs have to advertise that they'll let you write YA or fantasy or what-have-you is just absurd, but we do, because the presumption is that they're closed to that sort of thing. You're offering an MFA in creative writing? Teach people how to write well, worry about that part, let the writers come up with the stories.

  Tod Goldberg

  Reading, Writing, Offering

  Source: therumpus.net

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