Best 841 quotes in «irony quotes» category

Now, as I understand it, the bards were feared. They were respected, but more than that they were feared. If you were just some magician, if you'd pissed off some witch, then what's she gonna do, she's gonna put a curse on you, and what's gonna happen? Your hens are gonna lay funny, your milk's gonna go sour, maybe one of your kids is gonna get a hare-lip or something like that — no big deal. You piss off a bard, and forget about putting a curse on you, he might put a satire on you. And if he was a skilful bard, he puts a satire on you, it destroys you in the eyes of your community, it shows you up as ridiculous, lame, pathetic, worthless, in the eyes of your community, in the eyes of your family, in the eyes of your children, in the eyes of yourself, and if it's a particularly good bard, and he's written a particularly good satire, then three hundred years after you're dead, people are still gonna be laughing, at what a twat you were.

Now, ironically, in astronomy, the word "revolution" means "a celestial object that comes full circle." Did you know that? Which, if you think about it, is pretty funny, considering here on earth it means change.

Now it turns out that a few broadsheet film critics in Britain do indeed belong to a category of people who would have resisted Hitler when he came to power. So the great shame is, clearly film critics should have been running Austria at the time, because Hitler would have represented no problem to them at all. [The Guardian's] Peter Bradshaw would have known exactly what to do, and he would not have been remotely fallible to any Nazi who threatened his life. No, he would have died in heroic acts of individual resistance. So it's a privilege to live among people who enjoy such moral certainty.

Nuk shquhej për zgjuarsi, por në mësime ishte i pari.

Of course, for all their counterculture pretensions, corporations like Google, Amazon, and Apple are still corporations. They seek profits, they try to maximize their monopoly power, they externalize costs, and, of course, they exploit labor. The American technology sector has externalized the cost of industrial pollution to Chinas cities, where people live in a pall of smog but no one - certainly not Apple - has to bear the cost of cleanup. Apple/Foxconn’s dreadful labor practices in China are common knowledge, and those Amazon packages with the sunny smile issue forth from warehouses that are more like Blake’s “dark satanic mills” than they are the new employment model for the internet age. The technology industry has manufactured images of the rebel hacker and hipster nerd, of products that empower individual and social change, of new ways of doing business, and now of mindful capitalism. Whatever truth might attach to any of these, the fact is that these are impressions carefully managed to get us to keep buying products and, just as importantly, to remain confident in the goodness and usefulness of the high-tech industry. We are being told these stories in the hope that we will believe them, buy into them, and feel both ip and spiritually renewed by the association. Unhappily, in this view of things, mindfulness can be extracted from a context of Buddhist meanings, values, and purposes. Meditation and mindfulness are not part of a whole way of life but only a spiritual technology, a mental app that is the same regardless of how it is used an what it is used for. Corporate mindfulness takes something that has the capacity to be oppositional - Buddhism - and redefines it. Eventually, we forget that it ever had its own meaning.

Oh - a diamond ring - and Rhett, do buy a great big one!

Oh, I’m sorry. Did you want a fan club? You are right. I loved the movie, and you were perfect in it, you were absolutely amazing. Definitely Oscar material.

O masses, o masses! When will you assume the image and likeness of your avant-garde?

Once upon a time all the men of mind and genius in the world became of one belief- that is to say, of no belief. But it wearied them to think that within a few years after their death many cults and systems and prognostications would be ascribed to them which they had never...intended. So they said to one another: "Let's join together and make a great book that will last forever that will mock the credulity of man...We'll include all the most preposterous old wives' tales now current. We'll choose the keenest satirist alive to compile a deity from all the deities worshipped by mankind, a deity who will be more magnificent than any of them, yet so weakly human that he'll become a byword for laughter the world over- and we'll ascribe to him all sorts of jokes and vanities and rages, in which he'll be supposed to indulge for his own diversion, so that the people will read our book and ponder it, and there'll be no more nonsense in the world.

Once upon a time...long ago in a far-off place that everyone knows is not here or now or us.

Once you hold the hand of Death, the only thing in life that can scare you is a sense of humor.

One in a million of my diplomacy. Conscious of my immunities and securities. Securely cared for by the promise to Abraham for eternity.

One of life’s ironies is that the more honest and vulnerable you are, the more others try to discredit you as a fraud and a fake. Shut them up by not caring.

One notorious apikoros named Hiwa al-Balkhi, writing in ninth-century Persia, offered two hundred awkward questions to the faithful. He drew upon himself the usual thunderous curses—'may his name be forgotten, may his bones be worn to nothing'—along with detailed refutations and denunciations by Abraham ibn Ezra and others. These exciting anathemas, of course, ensured that his worrying 'questions' would remain current for as long as the Orthodox commentaries would be read. In this way, rather as when Maimonides says that the Messiah will come but that 'he may tarry,' Jewishness contrives irony at its own expense. If there is one characteristic of Jews that I admire, it is that irony is seldom if ever wasted on them.

...one of the roles of man is to shut his eyes and keep them shut to see if he can continue into the night of his old age the dream curtailed in the night of his youth.

Only then could he have a sad waffle with no syrup on it for breakfast. He didn’t think his mother made them properly: rumor in the village had it that waffles weren’t supposed to be gray.

Only in war does the madman become sane.

Oooh, intrigue?' Sylvie said playfully. 'Want to know a secret? I am someone else. Nobody knows the real me.' Jess opened the door, sick of being toyed with, wanting to get away. Her voice was flat. 'You're a girl. It's the same for all of us.

Our ability to measure and apportion time affords an almost endless source of comfort. “Synchronise watches at oh six hundred,” says the infantry captain, and each of his huddled lieutenants finds a respite from fear in the act of bringing two tiny pointers into jeweled alignment while tons of heavy artillery go fluttering overhead; the prosaic, civilian looking dial of the watch has restored, however briefly, an illusion of personal control. Good, it counsels, looking tidily up from the hairs and veins of each terribly vulnerable wrist; fine: so far, everything’s happening right on time… “Oh, let me see now,” says the ancient man, tilting his withered head to wince and blink at the sun in bewildered reminiscence, “my first wife passed away the spring of -” and for a moment he is touched with terror. The spring of what? Past? Future? What is any spring but a mindless rearrangement of cells in the crust of the spinning earth as it floats in endless circuit of its sun? What is the sun itself but one of a billion insensible stars forever going nowhere into nothingness? Infinity! But soon the merciful valves and switches of his brain begin to do their tired work, and “The spring of Nineteen-Ought-Six,” he is able to say. “Or no, wait-” and his blood runs cold again as the galaxies revolve. “Wait! Nineteen-Ought — Four.”… He may have forgotten the shape of his first wife’s smile and the sound of her voice in tears, but by imposing a set of numerals on her death, he has imposed coherence on his own life and on life itself… “Yes sir,” he can say with authority, “nineteen-Ought-Four,” and the stars tonight will please him as tokens of his ultimate heavenly rest. He has brought order out of chaos.

[Or perhaps my friends should have realized that they shouldn't have left behind the FRICKING REASON FOR THEIR PROTEST! And that thought just cracked me up.] It was like my friends had walked over the backs of baby seals in order to get to the beach where they could protest against the slaughter of baby seals.

Papa said that the parish priest in Abba was not spiritual enough. That was the problem with our people, Papa told us, our priorities were wrong; we cared too much about huge church buildings and mighty statues. You would never see white people doing that.

O young girl, throw yourself again into the water so that I might have a second time the chance to save the two of us!" A second time, eh, what imprudence! Suppose, dear sir, someone actually took our word for it? It would have to be fulfilled. Brr...! the water is so cold! But let's reassure ourselves. It's too late now, it will always be too late. Fortunately!

Peace ain't worth fighting for.

Para eso se había hecho la Revolución. Iban a tener las mismas oportunidades el obrero y el campesino y el abogado y el banquero. Sí, cómo no.

Personally I know only one person who wrote about utopia. Afterwards he was executed. I suppose it's not my genre.

Peace, that’s all I’m after.

People are raised to believe that happiness is the land to which they are destined to travel. But that belief, which one so easily accepts as true, might just as well be a mirage.

People tell you to believe in yourself for your whole life, then call you arrogant when you begin taking their advice.

Pessimism is a funny thing, isn't it? Madison thought as she looked at Judith's furrowed face. I like a bit of pessimism as much as the next man, but when I'm bombarded with it I suddenly became an eternal optimist.

Peter, who broke his enemies on the rack and hanged them in Red Square, who had his son tortured to death, is Peter the Great. But Nicholas, whose hand was lighter than that of any tsar before him, is "Bloody Nicholas". In human terms, this is irony rich and dramatic, the more so because Nicholas knew what he was called.

Pedersen was always wooing her. Sometimes he was gracious and kind, but at other times when his failure wearied him he would be cruel and sardonic, with a suggestive tongue whose vice would have scourged her were it not that Marie was impervious, or too deeply inured to mind it. She always grinned at him and fobbed him off with pleasantries, whether he was amorous or acrid. 'God Almighty,' he would groan, 'she is not good for me, this Marie. What can I do for her? She is burning me alive and the Skaggerack could not quench me, not all of it. The devil! What can I do with this? Some day I shall smash her across the eyes, yes, across the eyes.' So you see the man really loved her. ("The Tiger")

People are savages. Their civilized behaviour is only a conditioned response.

People often say that the English are very cold fish, very reserved, that they have a way of looking at things – even tragedy – with a sense of irony. There’s some truth in it; it’s pretty stupid of them, though. Humor won’t save you; it doesn’t really do anything at all. You can look at life ironically for years, maybe decades; there are people who seem to go through most of their lives seeing the funny side, but in the end, life always breaks your heart. Doesn’t matter how brave you are, how reserved, or how much you’ve developed a sense of humor, you still end up with your heart broken. That’s when you stop laughing. In the end there’s just the cold, the silence and the loneliness. In the end, there’s only death.

Perhaps we can conceive of the ironist as the fetishist's apprentice, reaching out for all readers, ensnaring them in a tangle of ambiguity, uncertainty and indecision from which there is no escape. Irony, quite possibly, makes fetishists of us all.

Philosophy is the art of ironic thinking. You can have the skills of critical and analytical thinking. However, without a trace of irony, it is impossible to engage in philosophy.

Petersas vaikščiojo po lagerį su tokia fizionomija, lyg jis nuolat dėkotų ponui Dievui už tai, kad jisai nosies skylutes sutvėrė į apačią, ne į viršų. Priešingu atveju nebūtų galima prieš katorgininkus nosies riesti: lietus prilytų.

Poor have always remained one level below than the rich. When poor people traveled on foot, rich rode horses. When poor rode on horses, rich used carts and chariots. When poor were using carts, rich were using motors. When poor used motors, rich used trains. Now when poor are able to travel in trains, rich fly.

Political convictions then were of the utmost importance, so intensely felt that it was difficult even for well-balanced and temperate men to think of the opposition party without bitterness. To the rank and file of the Federalists, the Democrats seemed a vulgar, ignorant mob at best, at worst a group of "knaves and blockheads." To the Democrats, the Federalists appeared abandoned traitors fawning at the feet of the British government, a blindly selfish aristocracy who deserved little better treatment than the French nobility had received a few years before during the Reign of Terror.

Politics is a great art. You need to know how to persuade people to pay for being robbed.

Poor people! They build tunnels to reach the light.

Peter sank. "I'd give anything to see time.

Psst"he called. The Cyclops lowered his hammer. He turned towards Zeus, but his one big eye had been staring into the flames so long that he couldn't see who was talking. "I am not Psst"The Cyclops said " I am Brontes" Oh boy, Zeus thought. This may take a while

Put a tiger on your tank

Put something new on the table and everyone wants a piece of it.

quoted Lewis Hyde, whose pamphlet on John Berryman and alcohol he had read in his early months at Granada House: “Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy the cage.” Then he continued: This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing….[I]rony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks.

Religious people were big on saying "the tongue is a mighty weapon, so use it wisely," and then forsaking this claim when the music director slept with the minister's wife or when the youth minister did what he did.

Regret and pangs of conscience are feelings we assign to others to make the world seem a little more fair, to even things out a little and provide consolation. In reality, those who do wrong to us never think about us as much as we think about them, and that is the ultimate irony: their deeds live inside us, festering, while they live out in the world, plucking peaches off trees, biting juicily into them, their minds on things lovely and sweet.

Regrets are a waste of time and waste of time brings about regrets. It's the best ironic cycle after life and death!

Regretfully, but I have to admit that A. Einstein was right. -''Who?''. Oh, there was such a guy...

Repeat a lie a thousand times and it become a successful political campaign.