Quotes about Irony

Last September 16th, I was walking in downtown Seattle when this pick-up truck pulls up in front of me. Guy leans out the window and yells, "Go back to your own country," and I was laughing so hard because it wasn't so much a hate crime as a crime of irony.

"Boise Cascade," said the other Republican husband.
"Sierra Club," said his Democrat wife.
'Wait, wait," I said. "So one of you fights for trees and the other fights against trees?"
"No, no," he said. "We make the paper she writes on to file lawsuits against the paper we make."

Okay, so maybe I'm romantic... but somebody is supposed to be romantic. Some warrior is supposed to go to war against the imperial forces of cynicism and irony. I am a sentimental soldier.

We all assume the worst the best we can.

Irony: Don't let yourself be controlled by it, especially during uncreative moments.

Evolution is like sex. Some people don't want to talk about it or even try to deny its very existence. Whereas it is actually the very reason they exist. I find it ironic that for those people these terms are freely exchangeable in this context.

Beggers provide the luxury.  They allow me to be generous.  They make me feel rich.

One must appreciate life's little ironies, even at one's own expense.

Irony gives us, at little expense, the impression that we are experienced psychologists.

I like grit, I like love and death, I'm tired of irony. ... A lot of good fiction is sentimental. ... The novelist who refuses sentiment refuses the full spectrum of human behavior, and then he just dries up. ... I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than die a smartass."

The irony of commitment is that it's deeply liberating ~ in work, in play, in love.

To think that one's actions could please the masses is indeed a notion bound in irony; someone will inevitably find something wrong in almost everything. So do what it is that you do best and remember to have enough tolerance for two. 

there is no paradox.  there is only irony. 

Even an atheist finds God when they point at what they don't believe in.

AA is for quitters.

It may be that we shall, by a process of sublime irony, have reached a stage in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation.

If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.

Empirical confirmation of Darwin's theory did not prove forthcoming in the first few decades following its publication. Indeed, by the early twentieth century, many noted naturalists had come to regard Darwin's account of evolution by natural selection as a theoretical failure. Some even described their continuing commitment to evolution as a matter of faith, rather an ironic justification in light of the impending Scopes trial of 1925. "I suppose that everyone is familiar in outline with the theory of the origin of species which Darwin promulgated. Through the last fifty years this theme of the natural selection of favored races has been developed and expounded in writings innumerable. Favored races certainly can replace others. The argument is sound, but we are doubtful of its value. For us that debate stands adjourned. We go to Darwin for his incomparable collection of facts. We would fain emulate his scholarship, his width and his power of exposition, but to us he speaks no more with philosophical authority. We read his scheme of evolution as we would those of Leucretius or of Lamarck, delighting in their simplicity and courage." "Modern research lends not the smallest encouragement or sanction to the view that gradual evolution occurs by the transformation of masses of individuals, though that fancy has fixed itself on popular imagination."

Some people suffer in silence louder than others.

Between "just desserts" and "tragic irony" we are given quite a lot of scope for our particular talent. Generally speaking, things have gone about as far as they can possibly go when things have got about as bad as they reasonably get.

So ego, then, is the absence of true knowledge of who we really are, together with its result: a doomed clutching on, at all costs, to a cobbled together and makeshift image of ourselves, an inevitably chameleon charlatan self that keeps changing and has to, to keep alive the fiction of its existence. . . . Ego is then defined as incessant movements of grasping at a delusory notion of "I" and "mine," self and other, and all the concepts, ideas, desires, and activity that will sustain that false construction. . . . The fact that we need to grasp at all and go on and on grasping shows that in the depths of our being we know that the self does not inherently exist. . . . {The ego's greatest triumph} is to inveigle us into believing its best interests are our best interests, and even into identifying our very survival with its own. This is a savage irony, considering that ego and its grasping are at the root of all our suffering. Yet ego is so convincing, and we have been its dupe for so long, that the thought that we might ever become egoless terrifies us.

The most perfect humor and irony is generally quite unconscious.

How ironic that foreign lands are stumbling to the light while we are striving mightily to put it out.

It is an old and ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way.

The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive.

Moral self-infatuation has its own corruptions, after all. With time, almost every other principle of the magazine acquired an ironic echo, a sort of cackling aftermath.

RAMSHACKLE, adj. Pertaining to a certain order of architecture, otherwise known as the Normal American. Most of the public buildings of the United States are of the Ramshackle order, though some of our earlier architects preferred the Ironic.

To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself.