Paradox Quotes - Page 24

• But that is the way of the place: down our many twisting corridors, one encounters story after story, some heroic, some villainous, some true, some false, some funny, some tragic, and all of them combining to form the mystical, undefinable entity we call the school. Not exactly the building, not exactly the faculty or the students or the alumni - more than all those things but also less, a paradox, an order, a mystery, a monster, an utter joy.

  Stephen L. Carter

  School, Order, Joy

  "The Emperor of Ocean Park". Book by Stephen L. Carter, April 1, 2002.

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• Many Republicans who traditionally were for a positive role in the world, anti-Russian, now they want to defend their party and leader, and they don't care about real arguments. The paradox is the Democrats were so timid in criticising Vladimir Putin. Barack Obama appeased him and now they are criticising Putin's interference in American democracy. It is a strange reversal of the roles.

  Garry Kasparov

  Real, Party, Leader

  Source: www.gq-magazine.co.uk

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• Here's the pay paradox that Why Men Earn More explains: Men earn more money, therefore men have more power; and men earn more money, therefore men have less power (earning more money as an obligation, not an option). The opposite is true for women: Women earn less money, therefore women have less power; and women earn less money, therefore women have more power (the option to raise children, or to not take a hazardous job).

  Warren Farrell

  Jobs, Children, Men

  Warren Farrell (2005). “Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap--and what Women Can Do about it”, p.24, AMACOM Div American Mgmt Assn

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• Here was a flower (the daisy reflected) strangely like itself and yet utterly unlike itself too. Such a paradox has often been the basis for the most impassioned love.

  Thomas M. Disch

  Flower, Daisies, Bases

  Thomas M. Disch (1986). “The brave little toaster: a bedtime story for small appliances”, Doubleday Books for Young Readers

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• I do not regret my youth and its beliefs. Up to now, I have wasted my time to live. Youth is the true force, but it is too rarely lucid. Sometimes it has a triumphant liking for what is now, and the pugnacious broadside of paradox may please it. But there is a degree in innovation which they who have not lived very much cannot attain. And yet who knows if the stern greatness of present events will not have educated and aged the generation which to-day forms humanity's effective frontier? Whatever our hope may be, if we did not place it in youth, where should we place it?

  Henri Barbusse

  Regret, Greatness, Humanity

  "Light" by Henri Barbusse, (Ch. XXII), 1919.

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• The secular state is the guarantee of religious pluralism. This apparent paradox, again, is the simplest and most elegant of political truths.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Religious, Pluralism Is, Political

  Christopher Hitchens (2014). “Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere”, p.104, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• There's a thing that if you - somebody in faith is always troubled by doubt, and somebody by doubt is always wanted by faith. So it's a kind of paradox.

  Anthony Hopkins

  Doubt, Kind, Wanted

  "Actor Sir Anthony Hopkins". "The Tavis Smiley Show", www.pbs.org. January 27, 2011.

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• Logic cannot model causal systems, and paradox is generated when time is ignored [as in logic].

  Gregory Bateson

  Logic, Ignored, Models

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• The deeper and richer a personality is, the more full it is of paradox and contradiction. It is only a shallow character who offers us no problems of contrast.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Character, Personality, Problem

  Madeleine L'Engle (2016). “A Circle of Quiet”, p.21, Open Road Media

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• We have a tendency to assume people are a unity, and thus good people all good, etc. But the fact that Hitler was good to dogs and children isn't a paradox.

  Richard Posner

  Dog, Children, People

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• The basic paradox about sex is that it always seems to be offering more than it can deliver. A glimpse of a girl undressing through a lighted bedroom window induces a vision of ecstatic delight, but in the actual process of persuading the girl into bed, the vision somehow evaporates.

  Colin Wilson

  Girl, Sex, Offering

  Colin Wilson (1988). “The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders”

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• But there's the paradox of fiction - why do you cry when a fake character dies? It's the basis of art. You engage with people who don't exist and care about them as you would your friends and relatives.

  Michael Gruber

  Art, Character, People

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• I do have a very conscious desire not to be academic. I'm antiacademic. I hate jargon. I hate that sort of pretension. I am a person who [commits] breaches of decorum - not in private life, but in my work. They are part of my mode of operation. That kind of playfulness is part of my nature in general. The paradox that, in a way, to take something very seriously, you can't always be serious about it.

  William H. Gass

  Hate, Desire, Jargon

  Interview with Stephen Schenkenberg, www.believermag.com. November, 2005.

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• I think that life is a paradox and you have to embrace that in your work and your belief systems... You can't be a literalist, and that's the trouble that people always find themselves in. That's why people always hit a wall with any of my stuff, because you can't take it literally.

  Madonna Ciccone

  Wall, Thinking, People

  Dazed & Confused Magazine, February 29, 2008.

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• The more I know, the more sure I am I know so little. The eternal paradox.

  James Clavell

  Littles, Eternal, Knows

  "Fictional character: Andre Delambre". "The Fly", July 16, 1958.

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• I have a principle I often invoke in class: comfortable people don't grow. Good teachers need to engage in the paradox of making students feel comfortable and uncomfortable in equal measure.

  Erica Brown

  Teacher, Class, People

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• I require silence to write the way an apple tree requires winter to make fruit. Being with people is intimate and joyous, but at some point, I'll wander off by myself. The paradox is that what began in childhood as an act of necessary solitude has led me straight to a life with others, in which I fly to China or Lithuania or northern Minnesota to read my poems and talk with other people who love language made into a lathe on which a life can be tuned and be turned.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Writing, Winter, Apples

  Source: www.sfgate.com

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• To meet God or Medusa face to face, even if it means risking everything human in myself. I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with the nonhuman world and yet somehow survives still intact individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock.

  Edward Abbey

  Dream, Mean, Self

  Edward Abbey (1996). “The Serpents of Paradise: A Reader”, p.166, Holt Paperbacks

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• If this were the time or the place to uphold a paradox, I am half inclined to state that Norfolk is one of the most beautiful of counties.

  Virginia Woolf

  Beautiful, Half, States

  Virginia Woolf, Jan Morris (1993). “Travels with Virginia Woolf”, Random House (UK)

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• I have a primary responsibility to myself; to make myself into the best person I can possibly be. Then and only then, will I have something worthwhile to share.- I have found the paradox that if I love until it hurts, then there is no hurt, but only more love.

  Mother Teresa

  Hurt, Responsibility, Share

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• The power paradox is that we gain power by advancing the welfare of other people and yet when we feel powerful, it turns us into impulsive sociopaths and we lose those very skills. If you're in the military, you gain power by forging strong ties in your comrades. And then the irony is that once we feel powerful and we are taken with our own success, we ignore the skills that got us power in the first place.

  Dacher Keltner

  Strong, Powerful, Military

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• This is positively not an album to play while you do a doctorate thesis on "Bergson, Webern and Charles the Vicious, Paradox or Ambiguity?"

  Bob Brookmeyer

  Music, Play, Albums

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• Major League Baseball's labor negotiations involve two paradoxes. The players' union's primary objective is to protect the revenues of a very few very rich owners - principally, the Yankees'. The owners' primary objective is a more egalitarian distribution of wealth. The union believes that unconstrained spending by the richest three teams pulls up all payrolls. Most owners believe that baseball's problems--competitive imbalance, the parlous financial conditions of many clubs--result from large and growing disparities of what are mistakenly treated as 'local' revenues.

  George Will

  Baseball, Team, Believe

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• Thanks to the discoveries of astronomers in the twentieth century, we now know that the heat death is a myth. The heat death can never happen, and there is no paradox.

  Freeman Dyson

  Discovery, Thanks, Heat

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• Such is the demographic paradox of a junior physician's relationship with his patients: I worry about how to extend their lives. This anxiety inevitably shortens my own.

  Jacob M. Appel

  Worry, Anxiety, Physicians

  Jacob M. Appel (2014). “Phoning Home: Essays”, p.55, Univ of South Carolina Press

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