Irony Quotes - Page 27

• It's not in the mainstream media yet, but the biggest jump in skin cancer has occurred since the advent of sunscreens. That kind of thing makes me happy. The fact that people, in pursuit of a superficial look of health, give themselves a fatal disease. I love it when 'reasoning' human beings think they have figured out how to beat something and it comes right back and kicks them in the nuts. God bless the law of unintended consequences. And the irony is impressive: Healthy people, trying to look healthier, make themselves sick. Good!

  George Carlin

  Cancer, Thinking, Media

  George Carlin (1998). “Brain Droppings”, Hyperion

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• It is a strange irony that the principles of science should seem to deny the necessary conviction of common sense.

  Lawrence Joseph Henderson

  Common Sense, Principles, Strange

  "The order of Nature". Book by awrence Joseph Henderson, Ch. 5, 1917.

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• Scientists are rarely to be counted among the fun people. Awkward at parties, shy with strangers, deficient in irony - they have had no choice but to turn their attention to the close study of everyday objects.

  Fran Lebowitz

  Fun, Party, Science

  Fran Lebowitz (2011). “The Fran Lebowitz Reader”, p.96, Vintage

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• Heaven has fashioned a knife of irony to stab me with.

  Rachel Hartman

  Knives, Heaven

  Rachel Hartman (2012). “Seraphina”, p.104, Random House

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• Failure is a trickster with a keen sense of irony and cunning. It takes great delight in tripping one when success is almost within reach.

  Napoleon Hill

  Inspirational, Delight, Tripping

  Napoleon Hill, Wyatt North (2014). “Think and Grow Rich”, p.23, Wyatt North Publishing, LLC

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• Truth offends everyone outside its definitions. But the irony of truth is that the greater its potential for offense, the greater its potential for giving hope.

  David Jeremiah

  Giving, Definitions, Truth Is

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• It is one of the ironies of the ministry that the very man who works in God's name is often hardest put to find time for God. The parents of Jesus lost Him at church, and they were not the last ones to lose Him there.

  Vance Havner

  Time, Jesus, Men

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• It is the oldest ironies that are still the most satisfying: man, when preparing for bloody war, will orate loudly and most eloquently in the name of peace.

  Alan Moore

  Peace, War, Men

  Alan Moore (1987). “Watchmen”, Dc Comics

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• Mumbling priests swinging stick cans on their chains and even witch doctors conjuring up curses with a well-buried elephant tooth have a better sense of their places in the world. They know this universe is brimming with magic, with life and riddles and ironies. They know that the world might eat them, and no encyclopedia could stop it.

  N.D. Wilson

  Doctors, Elephants, Magic

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• If sub specie aeternitatis [from eternity's point of view] there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that does not matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair.

  Thomas Nagel

  Inspirational, Life, Believe

  "Mortal questions". Book by Thomas Nagel, 1979.

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• I don't mock things, which makes me more vulnerable to mockery myself. If you're cynical, you're protected from mockery. But I have to be nice. I don't think I have irony. A sense of humour, yes, but not irony.

  Michel Gondry

  Nice, Thinking, Cynical

  "How Michel Gondry became cinema's most versatile director" by Ryan Gilbey, www.theguardian.com. December 9, 2010.

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• The irony of conversing with a stranger is that your individual lives always look very different and personal, but then you strip away the nuances to find a common likeness buried inside of diversity. Take away money and geography and we’re all just flesh and blood and soul. We’re all dealing with sin and forgiveness, love and hate, glory and shame.

  Charlie Peacock

  Hate, Blood, Diversity

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• United Nations peacekeepers are going all over the world spreading AIDS even while they're trying to bring peace. What a supreme irony.

  Richard Holbrooke

  Trying, World, Aids

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• Irony is the hardest addiction of all. Forget heroin. Just try giving up irony, the deep-down need to mean two things at once, to be in two places at once, not to be there for the catastrophe of a fixed meaning.

  Edward St Aubyn

  Giving Up, Mean, Two

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• Perhaps the saddest irony of depression is that suicide happens when the patient gets a little better and can again function sufficiently.

  Dick Cavett

  Suicide, Littles, Patient

  Dick Cavett (2010). “Talk Show: Confrontations, Pointed Commentary, and Off-Screen Secrets”, p.153, Macmillan

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• Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour an serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured within socialist-feminism.

  Donna J. Haraway

  Rhetorical Strategies, Play, Political

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• We talked a lot about Donald's [Trump] record on immigration. There is irony that he has made the center of his entire campaign immigration, given that he faced a $1 million court judgment for being part of a conspiracy to hire illegal aliens, given that news broke that he is hiring foreign workers at his fancy hotel in Florida.

  Ted Cruz

  Florida, Immigration, Campaigns

  "Face the Nation" with John Dickerson, www.cbsnews.com. February 28, 2016.

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• The irony is that I use computers every day of my life to do music because I edit all of my music in a computer. But when it comes to doing live processing, I prefer, as a performer with an instrument, not just having the computer as the only thing I have. I really prefer and find it much more flexible to have the limitations of pedals.

  Zeena Parkins

  Use, Computer, Pedals

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• This condition [irony] has nothing to do with writer's block, a psychological syndrome, which is one of the few I have not diagnosed for myself!

  Shirley Geok-lin Lim

  Block, Psychological, Syndromes

  Source: www.oxfordjournals.org

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• I've lived a lot in communist countries and they're intensely interested in money. I think they are more interested in money than capitalists are. They're the most materialistic people in the world. What they're actually living for is material things. The irony of that is that in communist countries there isn't anything to buy.

  Truman Capote

  Country, Thinking, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I see tragedy and comedy and pain and irony and all that stuff. But in the end I think life is fascinating, and I think people are more good than bad, and I think that the possibilities of prog­ress are real.

  Barack Obama

  Pain, Real, Thinking

  Source: www.vanityfair.com

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• Seeing any war through the distortion of comedy is healthy. There is just too much absurdity and irony at play in a combat zone not to pay attention to it. At least that's how it struck me; others may have had an entirely different war experience.

  Dave Abrams

  War, Play, Healthy

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I feel that there's hardly any irony in my work; if there's anything, there'll be sincerity, which people sometimes find hard to deal with.

  Patricia Piccinini

  People, Sometimes, Sincerity

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• Even the notion that, you know,[Bill] Clinton was the black president strikes me as the greatest irony of all times.

  Henry Giroux

  Black, President, Bills

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• Certain audiences get the double meaning and some of the references and ironies, but there's definitely been shows where I feel like I'm not doing it well enough for it to come across as anything other than "oh, she's hot and she's dancing."

  Emily Haines

  Dancing, Hot, Enough

  "Taking Measurements: An Interview with Metric". Interview With Devon Powers, www.popmatters.com. October 12, 2004.

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