Quotes About Irony

The culture of irony is the culture of postmodernism, which I would furiously want to denounce. We have to act ethically and politically. Irony is a defensive position, against reality. It always knows what to think about reality. The idea of commitment and engagement is central to me, which is not ironic.

Here we have the great irony of modern nutrition: at a time when hundreds of millions of people do not have enough to eat, hundreds of millions more are eating too much and are overweight or obese.

Don’t underestimate the value of irony—it is extremely valuable.

I like the irony in my work.

If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox.

We didn't understand irony yet in the '80s; we just kind of existed at face value, so there was no nerd cool yet because the digital revolution was still in its infancy.

The Principle of Tolerance, fixed once for all the realization that all knowledge is limited. It is an irony of history that at the very time when this was being worked out, there should rise, under Hitler in Germany and other tyrants elsewhere, a counter-conception: a principle of monstrous certainty. When the future looks back on the 1930's, it will think of them as a crucial confrontation of culture as I have been expounding it - the ascent of man against the throwback to the despots' belief that they have absolute certainty.

I think the Republican tax law is so bad that it almost guarantees a Republican victory, precisely because it's so bad. The seeming irony is that it's so bad that it enables the Democratic Party to think, "A-ha, all we have to do is be the lesser evil.

Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends.

Everyone asks about gold. This is the irony: just as Jim Grant tells us (correctly) that we all have faith-based paper currencies backed by nothing, it is equally fair to say that gold is a faith-based metal. It pays no dividend, cannot be eaten, and is mostly used for nothing more useful than jewelry. I would say that anything of which 75% sits idly and expensively in bank vaults is, as a measure of value, only one step up from the Polynesian islands that attached value to certain well-known large rocks that were traded.

The reason ... our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down.

It is a tragic and agonizing irony that instructions once delivered for the purpose of avoiding needless offense are now invoked in ways that needlessly offend, that words once meant to help draw people to the gospel now repel them.

Irony is an insult conveyed in the form of a compliment.

Ah, woman. She is an enigma. An anomaly of perfection & irony. She can lure angels into her arms & give birth to a nation of ideologies.

Maggie Nelson cuts through our culture's prefabricated structures of thought and feeling with an intelligence whose ferocity is ultimately in the service of love. No piety is safe, no orthodoxy, no easy irony. The scare quotes burn off like fog.

Truth offends everyone outside its definitions. But the irony of truth is that the greater its potential for offense, the greater its potential for giving hope.

My films often have a very strong strain of irony, or even sarcasm, which is definitely related to homosexual camp. But it is by no means straightforward: quite often I am sincere when I appear to be sarcastic, and I am sarcastic when I appear to be sincere. I also try to contradict myself at least once a day, which is a camp must.

labels can be fun! Some people are like, "As a card-carrying bear, where I also have a little bit of fairy in me..." People have fun collaging these; there's a fun people have with their identifications. The irony of them can be lost if you're just wholeheartedly anti-identitarian.

It's an astonishing skill that people can read, and read well. Very few people can read well. For instance, I have to be very careful with irony, saying something while meaning the exact opposite.

Walking over to Iggy, he poked him with his shoe. "Does anysing on you vork properly?" Iggy rubbed his forehead with one hand. "Well, I have a highly developed sense of irony." Ter Borcht tsked. "You are a liability to your group. I assume you alvays hold onto someone's shirt, yes? Following dem closely?" "Only when I'm trying to steal their dessert," Iggy said truthfully.

We have to remember, lefts are the people who created unsustainable national debt, unsustainable health insurance, health care, unsustainable college tuition and debt, unsustainable social welfare programs. Everything the left creates is unsustainable, it can't go on. Everything they create will eventually implode because it can't work as they designed it. Nothing they do is sustainable. That's the great irony. But they claim to know how to sustain life as we know it.

I feel as if one would only discover on one's death-bed what one ought to have lived for, and realise too late that one's life has been wasted. Any passionate and courageous life seems good in itself, yet one feels that some element of delusion is involved in giving so much passion to any humanly attainable object. And so irony creeps into the very springs of one's being.

Strong people stand up for themselves. Stronger people stand up for others. The irony is that while sleep sometimes brings nightmares, it's the reality of my waking hours that can cause me the greater fear.

We think craft is important, and the irony has always been that horror may be disregarded by critics, but often they are the best-made movies you're going to find in terms of craft. You can't scare people if they see the seams.

Doug returned five minutes later and shook his head. "Sorry kid. She's single, but she doesn't think you're her type. She's into the Goth and vampire scene. You're too mainstream for her." I was sipping a glass of water and nearly choked on it. "That," said Peter, as soon as Doug was gone, "is what we call irony." "How is that possible?" exclaimed Cody. "I am a vampire. I should be exactly what she wants." "Yeah, but you don't look like one," I said. If Gabrielle had been a Trekkie, he might have had a shot tonight.

It is the whole modern concept of love which should be re-examined, such as is commonly but transparently expressed in phrases like 'love at first sight' and 'honeymoon'. All this shoddy terminology is on top of that tainted with the most reactionary irony.

In my own work, humor is necessary, for the reasons stated above, but also because forbidding your characters silliness, absurdity, irony, and vulgarity forbids them aspects of the human experience every bit as universal as sorrow.

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.

Steiner 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.

Sometimes I think that no situation actually fits the technical definition of irony, and that the word just sort of hangs out in the linguistic ether singing a Siren song that's designed to crash the unsuspecting against the jagged rocks of pedantry.

Shut the door, they're coming through the window, shut the window, they're coming through the door," are the words to an old song. They fit my lifestyle with newly arriving butcher/censors every month. Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with censorship and book-burning in the future, write to tell me of this exquisite irony.

The irony or humor of my pieces is never really calculated, but they somehow always end up that way. Humor, especially when dealing with matters of extreme gravity, has a way of toppling set ideas and opening up new modes of interpretation. Furthermore, adding humor tends to shift the power balance.

Because 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.

The 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.

Some people say that parents don't matter, and that's not true at all. The irony is that we pay attention to all these things that don't matter, and not to what does matter, such as parents having enough resources to provide an environment where their children have both security and freedom.

Irony - The modern mode: either the devil’s mark or the snorkel of sanity.

I'd love to start some movements. What I'm tired of is irony, and sarcasm, and music/movies/what have you, not having the guts to mean anything.

Mirabelle 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.

There is grim irony in speaking of the freedom of contract of those who, because of their economic necessities, give their service for less than is needful to keep body and soul together.

I'm the type of spiritual person that doesn't speak openly about their spirituality. Irony is probably my religion.

I think my films are very English. That certain emotional distance, interest in the world, interest in irony. These are all deeply English propositions.

It's not in the mainstream media yet, but the biggest jump in skin cancer has occurred since the advent of sunscreens. That kind of thing makes me happy. The fact that people, in pursuit of a superficial look of health, give themselves a fatal disease. I love it when 'reasoning' human beings think they have figured out how to beat something and it comes right back and kicks them in the nuts. God bless the law of unintended consequences. And the irony is impressive: Healthy people, trying to look healthier, make themselves sick. Good!

You can't use irony as a way of disengaging with the difficult or emotional aspects of life.

When or if we "quote, unquote" do not like our work, it is probably because we do not feel safe where we go to work. So when you say, what can we do?, the irony is that the best thing we can do is, well one option, is to quit.

I think in everything we did, there's a sense of tension and a sense of things pulling in a different way. It's interesting calling it "beat music". That's quite true, the rhythm is up to the fore, it's got a slap bass, and it's got "funk" in the title. But I think there's always a level of irony when we did those kind of things.

It's no small irony that the government inevitably and invariably ends up promoting precisely that which they would most like to repress.

Now that’s true poetic irony. I rush into battle to defend the fair name of Rose Larkin, and what does she do but fetch Robert to stop me.

Irony is the gaiety of reflection and the joy of wisdom.