Popular quotes about Irony! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
Irony has seeped into the felt of any fedora hat I have ever owned - not out of any wish of mine, but out of necessity. A fedora hat worn by me without the necessary protective irony would eat through my head and kill me.
George W. S. TrowIrony is the hardest addiction of all. Forget heroin. Just try giving up irony, the deep-down need to mean two things at once, to be in two places at once, not to be there for the catastrophe of a fixed meaning.
Edward St AubynRich people making their houses bigger in order to make their lives happier wind up hurting their own marriages. There's a deep irony here. Do the couples perceive that irony?
Tucker CarlsonI think that I'm still very enthusiastic about every single thing that I do. I'm still very passionate. I never feel tired because I feel so involved and so com- mitted, so I enjoy it. And you know what? I have a lot of irony. I love the humor, and when I really, really want to just say, "You know what? I can't stand all this," I find an ironical way. I say, "You know, maybe you presume to be more intelligent than you are." So I respond in a more humoristic way.
Franca SozzaniThe naive is what is or appears to be natural, individual, or classical to the point of irony or to the point of continuous alternation of self-creation and self-destruction. If it is only instinct, then it is childlike, childish, or silly; if it is only intention, it becomes affectation.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich SchlegelLet's escape the past. The past didn't work. All we have is the future, and I'm the one who wrote "no future for you!" Don't let the irony be lost.
John LydonMost of us start from that position of irony now and what I wanted to do - really felt like I had to do if I was going to write another novel - was move towards something like sincerity.
Ben LernerThe irony is of course that my career has lasted a whole lot longer than some of the people I've parodied over the years.
Al YankovicWhen I started making movies about weird people, I knew they were weird, I was infected with irony, and I wanted New York to notice.
John WatersYou see a lot of interesting visual irony on movie sets all the time, you know duality, set illusions, the reality, all that stuff. You play with interesting materials that you couldn't afford to otherwise. You meet interesting people that you work with, have special machinists or mold makers and make-up people, and people who make prosthetic appliances for actress' faces. It's really interesting kind of witch's brew of people in that business, aside from the sleeze bags you hear about on the financial end.
Michael C. McMillenThe 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 KeltnerIt sounds strange, somewhat on the line between irony and absurdity, to think that people would rather label and judge something as significant as each other but completely bypass a peanut. ... World peace is only a dream because people won't allow themselves and others around them to simply be peanuts. We won't allow the color of a man's heart to be the color of his skin, the premise of his beliefs, and his self-worth. We won't allow him to be a peanut, therefore we won't allow ourselves to come to live in harmony. (Diary 18)
Erin GruwellThe irony of Christmas is always upon the poor in heart; the mystery of the solstice is always upon the rest of us.
John CheeverIt would be the irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs.
Woodrow WilsonIf you have a kid and you try irony out on them, they don't get it at 7, 8 years old. You can't really hide the Internet from kids. It worries me some particularly because I've done Disney and Pixar stuff.
Randy NewmanAh, woman. She is an enigma. An anomaly of perfection & irony. She can lure angels into her arms & give birth to a nation of ideologies.
Ace Antonio HallAfter the second chapter of Days of Obligation, which is about the death of a friend of mine from AIDS, was published in Harper's, I got this rather angry letter from a gay-and-lesbian group that was organizing a protest against the magazine. It was the same old problem: political groups have almost no sense of irony.
Richard RodriguezThere's no more delicious irony on the face of the Earth than environmental protesters being led away in plastic handcuffs that have a biodegradability horizon line of, like, 40,000 years.
Dennis MillerThe principle tragedy of my life is, like all tragedies, an irony of Destiny. I reject real life as if it were a condemnation; I reject dreams as if they were an ignoble liberation. [...]After the end of the stars uselessly whitened in the morning sky and the breeze became less cold in the barely orange tinged in the yellow of the light on the scattered low clouds, I, who hadn't slept, could finally, slowly raise my body, exhausted from nothing from the bed from which I had thought the universe.
Fernando PessoaHumanity, perhaps, that quality of benevolence that humans have, without irony, named after themselves.
Laini TaylorWhen was the last time you used the words 'teach me'? Maybe not since you started first grade? Here's an irony about school: The daily grind of tests, homework, and pressures sometimes blunts rather than stimulates a thirst for knowledge.
Jerry SpinelliSome people tell me that they like what I do, which is great, of course. The perfect irony and truth is that I need them much more than they need me.
Henry RollinsThe irony is, the advertising industry knows everyone hates what they produce. This is why they keep looking for new ways to force people to stay tuned.
Simon SinekA sharp sense of the ironic can be the equivalent of the faith that moves mountains. Far more quicky than reason or logic, irony can penetrate rage and puncture self-pity.
Moss HartThe unhappy irony is that, while 'Glee' is hitting the heights, school arts funding is being slashed across the country due to the steep recession and declining tax revenues.
James WolcottTime changes all things and cultivates even in herself an appreciation of irony, and, therefore, why shouldn't I have changed a trifle?
James Branch CabellSteiner has here transformed the vaporous conceptions of his life, the vapors of what never was and never will be, from their aeriform state to a fine and ethereal substantiality. My Unwritten Books is a gathering of shades, an elegant and eloquent gathering of mind, feeling, and autumnal passion. (...) And that is the lovely irony of this unique little book. None of these unwritten books should have been written. They are better here, as they are, untamed and errant phantoms of a brilliance whose emanations no one mortal lifetime could ever accommodate in full.
Nick ToschesWe must uncover our rituals for what they are: completely arbitrary things, tied to our bourgeois way of life; it isgood-and that is the real theater-totranscend them in the manner of play, bymeans of games and irony; it is good to be dirty and bearded, to have long hair,to look like a girl when one is a boy (and vice versa); one must put "inplay," show up, transform and reversethe systems which quietly order us about.
Michel FoucaultLanguage and, presumably, literature are more ancient and inevitable, more durable than any form of social organization. The revulsion, irony, or indifference often expressed by literature toward the state is essentially the reaction of the permanent-better yet, the infinite-against the temporary, against the finite.
Joseph BrodskyI don't think readers of Mann have overlooked the fact that he was a great ironist, but they have tended to see the irony in particular parts of the novella, and to miss it in others.
Philip KitcherTo some, the temporal triumph of the Christian community in the world is a sign of God's favor and the essential righteousness of the Christian position. The irony of the matter, though, is that whenever the Christian community gains worldly power, it nearly always loses its capacity to be the critic of the power and influence it so readily brokers.
Peter J. GomesThe real marriage of true minds is for any two people to possess a sense of humor or irony pitched in exactly the same key, so that their joint glances on any subject cross like interarching searchlights.
Edith WhartonWas Mann himself fully aware of all the facets of his irony? Probably not - any more than Shakespeare was fully aware of all the riches subsequent critics have found in his plays.
Philip KitcherBecause we can engineer genetics, because we can telecast real lives-of course we must, right? But are these good things to do? The irony is, the people who will finally answer that question will be the very ones produced by the process.
Roger EbertIt may well be that we shall by a process of sublime irony have reached a state in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation.
Winston ChurchillThe rottenness of politics in Yugoslavia didn't come as a surprise. The main lesson is that this is a war which could have easily been stopped by Europe. What was lacking was any will to do so. It's an irony of the achievement of Europe that it had lived for 40 years under the assumption of the unimaginability of internal wars, so it didn't know what to do with it when it was confronted with one close up.
Tony JudtThe present is filled with flotsam and irony and chaos and disorder in all arenas, political and sociological. I think we have to work in the present even if it's awkward, even if it's not necessarily good, even if we don't understand it ourselves. You only find out 10, maybe 20 years later what was going on.
Frank GehryWhat people adore about superhero movies is the signal quality of the Christopher Nolan films - their complete lack of irony when it comes to the portrayal of heroism and the need for heroes to confront evil.
John PodhoretzWhat a cruel irony of fate, to pair together, like Siamese twins united by the shoulders, scientific adversaries of such contrasting character!
Santiago Ramon y CajalMirabelle replaces the absent friends with books and television mysteries of the PBS kind. The books are mostly nineteenth-century novels in which women are poisoned or are doing the poisoning. She does not read these books as a romantic lonely hearts turning pages in the isolation of her room, not at all. She is instead an educated spirit with a sense of irony. She loves the gloom of these period novels, especially as kitsch, but beneath it all she finds that a part of her indentifies with all that darkness.
Steve Martin