Best 841 quotes in «irony quotes» category

In a nutshell, I am not unaware of my failings. Neither am I a stranger to irony.

I never take out clients. It’s bad policy.” He looked me straight in the eyes as he said it. Reaching across for the glove compartment, his arm accidentally brushed my leg.

Inexplicably, I felt drops of icy sweat dripping up my back. I am aware that icy and sweat are contradictory by their very nature and should not be able to coexist in the same freakish bead of ICK WHAT IS THAT falling up my back. I am also aware things are not supposed to fall up. For that matter, criminals aren’t supposed to get it on with crimefighters. Yet here we were: Catwoman, Batman, icy, sweat, dripping, up. Sometimes life is like that.

In Hegel's case the irony ceases at the end of the system, because all the negatives lead eventually to the positive recognition that one has exhausted negativity: negativity is the path to the truth. Romantic irony, on the other hand, does not come to an end. The sense that we can never rest with a final certainty becomes the essential fact about our being. Romantic irony is, then, an attitude of mind which tries to come to terms with the finitude of every individual's existence, rather than trying to transcend that finitude by reaching a positive, philosophical conclusion. The scepticism involved in Romantic irony is not the kind of scepticism which worries about whether all our beliefs might be false, but rather a kind of 'fallibilism', which assumes we may always come up with new and better ways of dealing with things, because being transcends what we know of it.

In league with being graced by greatness, prepare to be greeted, by all that is beneath you.

In many ways it would be an unprecedented plague, a calamity like the one that had befallen the Egyptians in the Old Testament. The only difference between the Egyptians then and the Americans now was that the Egyptians had been cursed by their own wickedness. They had called an abomination upon their land by worshipping idols and enslaving their fellow humans, all so they could live in splendor. They had chosen riches over righteousness, rapaciousness over justice. The Americans had done no such thing.

In November 1849, he began a long multi-part lecture series entitled, 'What is Bourgeois Property?' Well might he ask, since he had none.

In order to do the unthinkable, do not think about it.

In Russia, war will never be popular with the profound masses of people. Revolutionary ideas are more in their taste than a victory over Germany. But one does not escape one's destiny... - Russian Minister of the Interior, Nikolai Maklakov, on 29 July 1914.

Inscriptions here of various Names I view'd, The greater part by hostile time subdu'd; Yet wide was spread their fame in ages past, And Poets once had promis'd they should last.

In spite of her superficial independence, her fundamental need was to cling. All her life was an attempt to disprove it; and so proved it. She was like a sea anemone -- had only to be touched once to adhere to what touched her.

In sum, then a conservative tech writer offers a really attractive way of looking at viewer passivity and TV's institutionalization of irony, narcissism, nihilism, stasis. It's not our fault! It's outmoded technology's fault! If TV-dissemination were up to date, it would be impossible for it to "institutionalize" anything through its demonic "mass psychology"! Let's let Joe B., the little lonely guy, be his own manipulator or video-bits! Once all experience is finally reduced to marketable image, once the receiving user of user-friendly receivers can choose freely, Americanly, from an Americanly infinite variety of moving images hardly distinguishable from real-life images, and can then choose further just how he wishes to store, enhance, edit, recombine, and present those images to himself, in the privacy of his very own home and skull, TV's ironic, totalitarian grip on the American psychic cajones will be broken!" E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" (The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 1993)

In the beginning there was the Word. Then we broke it.

In the chamber, [Frances Hamling] sat close to her husband [William Hamling, about to go before the US Supreme Court on 4/15/74], trying to repress the anxiety she felt about his future. Four years in prison and $87,000 in fines was hardly a matter of casual contemplation. Since nobody was supposed to speak or even whisper in the chamber, she diverted herself by glancing around at the room's opulent interior, the impressive bone-white china columns and red velvet draperies that formed the background behind the polished judicial bench and high black leather chairs. A gold clock hung down from between two pillars, signaling that it was 9:57 a.m. -- a few minutes before the justices' scheduled arrival. Along the upper edge of the front of the room, close to the top of the forty-four-foot ceiling, Frances noticed an interesting, voluptuous section of Classical art: It was a golden beige marble frieze that extended across the width of the room and showed about twenty nude and seminude men, women, and children gathered in various poses. The figures symbolized the embodiment of human wisdom and truth, righteousness, and virtue; but the bodies to her could as easily have represented an assemblage of Roman hedonists or orgiasts, and it struck her as ironic that such a scene should be hovering over the heads of the jurists who would be questioning her husband's use of illustrations in the Presidential Report on Obscenity and Pornography.

In the State of Denmark there was the odor of decay...

In the grounds of the château was a church said to date from the year 1000, and he went to look at it, but he had never really understood what people saw in old churches.

I recalled with some discomfort that the man driving the vehicle had invented the sport of volcano boarding, presumably as a way of solving, in one deft move, the problems of the insufficient riskiness of both snowboarding and hanging out on the slopes of active volcanoes. Although I was not sure that I wanted to live forever, I was sure that I didn’t want to go down in a blaze of chintzy irony, plunging into a ravine strapped into the passenger seat of a thing called the Immortality Bus.

I preyed on this sort of thing, discontentment, a clash of passions among the rivals, and the zealots. Open sores opened secrets. That’s how I roll.” Jackson Guild, The Trinity Conspiracy, Betrayal at Black Mesa

Ironic, isn’t it?” Shawn said. “It’s not ironic at all,” Gus said. “Dude, it’s so like a black fly in your chardonnay.” “How many times do I have to tell you that’s not ironic, either?” “Rain on your wedding day?” “‘Irony’ is the use of words to convey a meaning that’s opposite to their literal meaning,” Gus said. “That stupid song came out fourteen years ago, and we still have this exact conversation at least once a week.” “Yeah,” Shawn said. “Ironic, isn’t it?

Irony cleans away all those secret stains. Irony is the path that leads safely back to official realities.

Irony; we want to dance like robots and want robots to dance like us.

Irony: When those who call others a 'threat to Christianity' reject the crucial tenets of their own faith themselves.

Ironic. I'm here because of my inherent dangerousness, but it's my inherent politeness that makes me put up with this. With him.

Irony and hip ennui are extremely authoritarian.

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 and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured within socialist-feminism.

Irony is a linguistic trust fall.

Irony is not one of my favorite modes of communication, but I can still recognize it.

Irony is that indifference is the most easily learned attitude.

Irony is a treacherous servant; unless it's very carefully watched over, it has a tendency to expose the foolishness of its apparent master.

Irony is only skin deep.

Irony of the world is that it wants to simplify the complexity and complicate the simplicity.

Irony takes nothing away from pathos.

I scrupulously hide every legitimate reason for people to hate me, and it turns out they don’t need legitimate reasons. Heaven has fashioned a knife of irony to stab me with.

I paid, got up, walked to the door, opened it. I heard the man say, "that guy's nuts." out on the street I walked north feeling curiously honored.

I once saw a note on a Stasi file from early 1989 that I would never forget. In it a young lieutenant alerted his superiors to the fact that there were so many informers in church opposition groups at demonstrations that they were making these groups appear stronger than they really were. In one of the most beautiful ironies I have ever seen, he dutifully noted that, by having swelled the ranks of the opposition, the Stasi was giving the people heart to keep demonstrating against them.

...I remember that my mother had always said to be polite and finish my meal. At last he gave no more struggles. The deed was done. Now the boat contained four men, not one heartbeat among us. The fate they had destined for another claimed them as well. The irony of it all was more delicious than the blood consumed. -- Quote by Lane DeLuca

Irony of the day: arthritis medication with a cap that old people can't get off, because of their arthritis.

Irony, we want our handwriting to look like typed fonts, and our computer fonts to look like handwritten text.

Irony can be an endearing friend in one moment, and a cruel enemy in the next.

Irony can be tiresome when what you really need is a hug.

Irony is a gift of the gods, the most subtle of all the modes of speech. It is an armour and a weapon; it is a philosophy and a perpetual entertainment; it is food for the hungry of wit and drink to those thirsting for laughter...

irony is for a traveler while traveling, happiness increases as the distance increases.

Irony; these days, images have so much noise; and people, silent.

Irony is easier than hopeless silence but braver than flight.

Irony is only skin deep. Undernearh, a heart is beating.

Irony serves as an alibi for a fetish.

I saw an injured black cat. God knows, who has crossed her path.

I sheep's idea of bravery : To become a wolf's pet.

ISIS stands for Islamic State In Syria. It's an acronym. ISIS is also the name of a bad ass Egyptian goddess. So for a group that is so anti woman I find it interesting and ironic that they named themselves after one

I should learn patience, it's a shame there's no time for that.