Contradiction Quotes - Page 33

• I don't think that the contradictions between capitalism and socialism can be resolved by war. This is no longer the age of the bow and arrow. It's the nuclear age, and war can annihilate us all. The only way to achieve solutions seems to be for the different social systems to coexist.

  Fidel Castro

  War, Thinking, Arrows

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• To believe fully and at the same moment to have doubts is not at all a contradiction: it presupposes a greater respect for truth, an awareness that truth always goes beyond anything that can be said or done at any given moment.

  Rollo May

  Truth, Believe, Doubt

  Rollo May (1994). “The Courage to Create”, p.21, W. W. Norton & Company

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• The state is based on this contradiction. It is based on the contradiction between public and private life, between universal and particular interests. For this reason, the state must confine itself to formal, negative activities.

  Karl Marx

  Life, Negative, Reason

  Karl Marx (1975). “Early writings”, Vintage

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• My biography of Frank Sinatra is not paean to his music but rather an illumination of the man behind the music, who once described himself as 'an 18-karat manic-depressive who lived a life of violent emotional contradictions with an over-acute capacity for sadness as well as happiness.

  Kitty Kelley

  Happiness, Sadness, Men

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• Remote control. Ingenious contradiction of terms. Fits like a handshake. Aims like a gun.

  Roger Rosenblatt

  Gun, Weapons, Fit

  Roger Rosenblatt (1994). “The Man in the Water: Essays and Stories”, Random House

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• I oppose any belief that contradicts experimental evidence as determined by the methods of science. All beliefs not in such contradiction may be considered as faith. Whether faith in a particular belief is beneficial or not is another matter.

  Alan Lightman

  May, Matter, Determined

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• I fall in love with contradictions without understanding. I can't really portray them unless I do. So in a roundabout way I have to fall in love, it's my duty. If love is about understanding and understanding is compassion and compassion is love, I have to have compassion towards the world.

  Joseph Fiennes

  Falling In Love, Love Is, Compassion

  "No ordinary Joe" by Chrissy Iley, www.theguardian.com. January 13, 2007.

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• I think many people have contradictions to them and I love characters that deal with those contradictions.

  Giancarlo Esposito

  Character, Thinking, People

  "Giancarlo Esposito talks ‘Breaking Bad,’ ‘Revolution’ and Emmys". Interview with Alan Sepinwall, uproxx.com. July 31, 2012.

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• Our reasonings are grounded upon two great principles, that of contradiction, in virtue of which we judge false that which involves a contradiction, and true that which is opposed or contradictory to the false.

  Gottfried Leibniz

  Science, Two, Judging

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• This (functional - E.W.) language controls by reducing the linguistic forms and symbols of reflection, abstraction, development, contradiction; by substituting images for concepts. It denies or absorbs the transcendent vocabulary; it does not search for but establishes and imposes truth and falsehood.

  Herbert Marcuse

  Reflection, Vocabulary, Doe

  Herbert Marcuse (2013). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.106, Routledge

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• We live fragmented, compartmentalized lives in which contradictions are carefully sealed off from each other. We have been taught to think linearly rather than comprehensively, and we do this not through conscious design or because we are not intelligent or capable, but because of the way in which deep cultural undercurrents structure life in subtle but highly consistent ways that are not consciously formulated.

  Edward T. Hall

  Life, Thinking, Intelligent

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• I always look for contradiction in a character.

  Rebecca Hall

  Character, Looks

  "Rebecca Hall Talks PARADE’S END, Her Extreme Character, How Invigorating the Role Was, Working with Benedict Cumberbatch and IRON MAN 3". Interview with Christina Radish, collider.com. February 24, 2013.

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• Such self-transformation is the most difficult and dangerous challenge to the imagination, and it is the most rewarding. Meeting it is only possible for the person whose mind is open to contradictions and well-practiced in free conjecture.

  Robert Grudin

  Self, Imagination, Challenges

  Robert Grudin (1990). “The Grace of Great Things: Creativity and Innovation”, Ticknor & Fields

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• The human beings at the helm of the new nation [USA], whatever their limitations [slave owners, anti-democracy], were truly revolutionary. The theory of liberty born in that era, the seed of the idea, was perfect.More important, the idea itself carried within it the moral power to correct the contradictions in its execution that were obvious from the very birth of the new nation.

  Naomi Wolf

  Usa, Ideas, Slave Owners

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• A quiet city is a contradiction in terms. It is a thing uncanny, spectral.

  Max Beerbohm

  Cities, Quiet, Uncanny

  Sir Max Beerbohm (1958). “Selected essays”

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• There is a contradiction between market liberalism and political liberalism. The market liberals (e.g., social conservatives) of today want family values, less government, and maintain the traditions of society (at least in America's case). However, we must face the cultural contradiction of capitalism: the progress of capitalism, which necessitates a consumer culture, undermines the values which render capitalism possible

  Slavoj Žižek

  Government, America, Political

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• There is nothing more lonely than eternity. And nothing is more cozy for us than to be a human being. This indeed is another contradiction-how can we keep the bonds of our humanness and still venture gladly and purposefully into the absolute loneliness of eternity?

  Carlos Castaneda

  Lonely, Loneliness, Cozy

  Carlos Castaneda (2013). “Fire from Within”, p.97, Simon and Schuster

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• Change does not fail to occur because of insincerity. The heart patient is not insincere about his wish to keep living, even as he reaches for another cigarette. Change fails to occur because we mean both things. It fails to occur because we are a living contradiction.

  Robert Kegan

  Heart, Mean, Wish

  Robert Kegan, Lisa Laskow Lahey (2013). “Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization”, p.38, Harvard Business Press

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• No man could bring himself to reveal his true character, and, above all, his true limitations as a citizen and a Christian, his true meannesses, his true imbecilities, to his friends, or even to his wife. Honest autobiography is therefore a contradiction in terms: the moment a man considers himself, even in petto, he tries to gild and fresco himself. Thus a man's wife, however realistic her view of him, always flatters him in the end, for the worst she sees in him is appreciably better, by the time she sees it, than what is actually there.

  H. L. Mencken

  Christian, Character, Men

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.325, Vintage

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• When we accept all of life's contradictions, when we can comfortably flow between the banks of pleasure and pain, experiencing them both while getting stuck in neither, then we are free.

  Deepak Chopra

  Pain, Flow, Pleasure

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• The current operating system [culture] is flawed. It actually has bugs in it that generate contradictions. We're cutting the earth from beneath our own feet. We're poisoning the atmosphere that we breathe. This is not intelligent behaviour. This is a culture with a bug in its operating system that's making it produce erratic, dysfunctional, malfunctional behaviour. Time to call a tech! And who are the techs? The shamans are the techs.

  Terence McKenna

  Cutting, Intelligent, Feet

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• Human nature is full of riddles and contradictions; its very complexity engenders art-and by art I mean the search for something more than simple linear formulations, flat solutions, oversimplified explanations.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Art, Mean, Simple

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• Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind and in contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the great and good. Heroism is an obedience to a secret impulse of an individual

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Voice, Secret, Heroism

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.1362, Delphi Classics

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• One may disavow and disclaim vices that surprise us and whereto our passions transport us. But those which by long habit are rooted in a strong and anchored in a powerful will are not subject to contradiction. Repentance is but a denying of our will, and an opposition of our fantasies, which diverts us here and there.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Forgiveness, Strong, Powerful

  "Shakespeare's Montaigne: The Florio Translation of the Essays, A Selection".

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• Love not pleasure; love God. This is the Everlasting Yea, wherein all contradiction is solved.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Love, Pleasure, Everlasting

  Thomas Carlyle (2016). “Sartor Resartus: The Historian”, p.141, 北戴河出版

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