Best 841 quotes in «irony quotes» category

For the whole earth is the tomb of famous men; not only are they commemorated by columns and inscriptions in their own country, but in foreign lands there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them, graven not on stone but in the hearts of men. Make them your examples, and, esteeming courage to be freedom and freedom to be happiness, do not weigh too nicely the perils of war." [Funeral Oration of Pericles]

For 'wellness', naturally is no cause of complaint--people relish it, they enjoy it, they are at the furthest pole from complaint. People complain of feeling ill--not well. Unless, as George Eliot does, they have some intimation of 'wrongness' or danger, either through knowledge or association, or the very excess of excess. Thus, though a patient will scarcely complain of being 'very well', they may become suspicious if they feel 'too well'.

Frankly speaking, I'm not afraid of death. I don't endeavour to avert its advent. But I don't want to be a witness of it.

Fukuyama’s thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious. It should be remembered, though, that even when Fukuyama advanced it, the idea that history had reached a ‘terminal beach’ was not merely triumphalist. Fukuyama warned that his radiant city would be haunted, but he thought its specters would be Nietzschean rather than Marxian. Some of Nietzsche’s most prescient pages are those in which he describes the ‘oversaturation of an age with history’. ‘It leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself’, he wrote in Untimely Meditations, ‘and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism’, in which ‘cosmopolitan fingering’, a detached spectatorialism, replaces engagement and involvement. This is the condition of Nietzsche’s Last Man, who has seen everything, but is decadently enfeebled precisely by this excess of (self) awareness.

Funny, though, I don't feel too bad.

General Peckem even recommends that we send our men into combat in full-dress uniform so they'll make a good impression on the enemy when they're shot down".

Gij vreesdet mooglijk voor een spoorwegramp? Maar, Rika, wat kon zaalger voor mij zijn, Dan, onder hels geratel en gestamp, Met u verplet te worden door één trein?

girls please give your bodies and your lives to the young men who deserve them besides there is no way I would welcome the intolerable dull senseless hell you would bring me and I wish you luck in bed and out but not in mine thank you.

God being dead, irony still rollickingly alive...

God forgive them for they know now what they do? They know what they do, forced pressures of life is what they put all us through. This isn't new, It's Babylonian rules. If they could tax our oxygen, trust they would through collection of big face bills in blue.

Good advice is usually given by someone who was once a bad example.

God’s in His heaven— All’s right with the world!

Good judgment comes by way of experience, which comes of bad judgment.

Good luck is abnormal bad luck is common

Hard times' is a phrase the English love to use, when speaking of Africa. And it is easy to forget that Africa's 'hard times' were made harder by them.

Happy Labour's day! Let's make a world with better illusions!

Harold adds an important idea to that of Evans-Pritchard. "The state always seems to come down on the little guy," he notes. "Take this bayou. If your motorboat leaks a little gas into the water, the warden'll write you up. But if companies leak thousands of gallons of it and kill all the life here? The state lets them go. If you shoot an endangered brown pelican, they'll put you in jail. But if a company kills the brown pelican by poisoning the fish he eats? They let it go. I think they overregulate the bottom because it's harder to regulate the top.

He also said that he marvelled that among the Greeks, those who were skilful in a thing contend together; but those who have no such skill act as judges of the contest.

Hay quienes dicen que, de ser rubia, podría hacer de Bridges Jones sin problemas. Deben estar bromeando, porque nunca he preparado una sopa azul

Have you ever noticed how good things go to those who hate?

Haw! Haw! Inconceivable stupidity is just what you're going to get! (Brigadier-General Henry Wilson, on being challenged in 1910 about the likelihood of a European war)

He aquí lo que obligó en todos los tiempos a los padres de la nación a recurrir a la intervención del cielo, (...) a fin de que los pueblos obedeciesen con libertad y llevasen dócilmente el yugo de la felicidad pública.

He gave me a warm smile, and I blinked, realizing he was cute. I'd never really had the luxury of noticing cuteness or lack thereof in guys. Mostly it was the lethal/nonlethal distinction that I went with

He had the tendency, unfortunate for a new member of the committee, to like if not the rich themselves, at least their activities and surroundings, and to dislike the poor; a woman in rags toting a baby, barefoot children, made him feel sadistic rather than compassionate. His socialism, then, had the impatience and unfriendliness of a fashionable doctor forced to attend a tramp run over in the street.

He had been trying to measure the distance between the earth and God.

He had had much experience of physicians, and said 'the only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd druther not'.

He gave me the key, which I later discovered would open practically every door in the hotel. I thanked him, and I made a small mistake we irony collectors often make: I tried to share an irony with a stranger. It can’t be done. I told him I had been in the Arapahoe before—in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one. He was not interested.

He himself, Anthony went on to think, he himself had chosen to regard the whole process as either pointless or a practical joke. Yes, chosen. For it had been an act of the will. If it were all nonsense or a joke, then he was at liberty to read his books and exercise his talents for sarcastic comment; there was no reason why he shouldn't sleep with any presentable woman who was ready to sleep with him. If it weren't nonsense, if there was some significance, then he could no longer live irresponsibly. There were duties towards himself and others and the nature of things. Duties with whose fulfilment the sleeping and the indiscriminate reading and the habit of detached irony would interfere. He had chosen to think it nonsense, and nonsense for more than twenty years the thing had seemed to be – nonsense, in spite of occasional uncomfortable intimations that there might be a point, and that the point was precisely in what he had chosen to regard as the pointlessness, the practical joke.

He led them around the base of a great fallen tree whose exposed roots resembled more than anything else a huge broom - a broom that would have fired the imagination of Rachel the Dragon toward heroic, legendary feats of sweeping.

He liked the Leedses. He was sorry that he had been to the morgue. He thought the madman who visited them might have liked them too. But the madman would like them better the way they were now.

Hell's bells, irony blows.

Her logic was a combination of half-truths and clichés, her worldview a compound of misconceptions deriving from a history of our nation as written from the perspective of a subway tunnel.

He never quarreled with his wife, but he never talked to her;--he never had time to talk, he was so taken up with speaking.

Help yourself with the state! It's on democracy!

Her beauty was a weapon. A loaded gun, with the barrel pointed at her own head.

Here was the world-famous novelist with her penchant for detail; yet, in her observations of a prostitute with a customer, she had failed to come away with the most important detail of all. She could never identify the murderer; she could barely describe him. She'd made a point of not looking at him!

He smelled the smells of commerce and listened to the cursing of the sailors, both of which he admired: the former, as it reeked of wealth, and the latter because it combined his two other chief preoccupations, these being theology and anatomy.

He sure put things into words good.

He's crazy," Bruno said, twirling a finger in circles around the side of his head and whistling to indicate just how crazy he thought he was. "He went up to a cat on the street the other day and invited her over for afternoon tea." "What did the cat say?" asked Gretel, who was making a sandwich in the corner of the kitchen. "Nothing." explained Bruno. "It was a cat.

He was notorious for cutting short extraneous verbiage from over-loquacious barristers".

He was shivering like a Wicklow sheepdog in a snowy yard, though the weather was officially 'clement'. The first layer of clothing was his jacket, the second his shirt, the third his long-johns, the fourth his share of lice, the fifth his share of fear.

He was mad, and for that, we have reason to be glad. A truly savage irony, on which it is discomforting to dwell.

He wears his cockiness like an ironic T-shirt, but it fits him better.

He who laughs at another person's affliction will also be laughed at when afflicted" RjS

He won’t stop the war until you give him the peace prize.

Hey, GreenHollyWood the mistake was mine that I added you as a friend... I thought that you are my friend... but your irony doesn't end.

His face had been twisted into an expression of every agony he had imagined for his friend.

His boat sank. They were all on his side.

How bold we are. We shy from a flame that licks the tip of our finger for a fraction of a second, and from which we are allowed the luxury of escape. But most of humankind flaunt their disobedience in the face of an eternal fire that engulfs all, and from which there is no escape. Ever.

how can it be that the modern human mind is capable of precise logical analysis, and yet simultaneously permits us to accept religious beliefs that should crumble beneath even the slightest rational scrutiny?