Ironic Quotes

Sentimental irony is a dog that bays at the moon while pissing on graves.

Rock is ironic in that, up to a certain point, you can get better and better at it if you don't mind possibly looking more and more ridiculous.

How much truth is contained in something can be best determined by making it thoroughly laughable and then watching to see how much joking around it can take. For truth is a matter that can withstand mockery, that is freshened by any ironic gesture directed at it. Whatever cannot withstand satire is false.

It's way beyond ironic that a place called the Holy Land is the location of the fiercest, most deeply felt hatred in the world. And it makes for wonderful theater.

The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.

It's kind of ironic that if I get my Ph.D., I'll be a real doctor

In an ironic sense, Karl Marx was right. We are witnessing today a great revolutionary crisis, a crisis where the demands of the economic order are conflicting directly with those of the political order. But the crisis is happening not in the . . . West, but in the home of Marxism-Leninism, the Soviet Union. It is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of history by denying human freedom and human dignity to its citizens.

In our native terms, the ironic style is often compounded with the sardonic and the hard-boiled; even the effortlessly superior. But irony originates in the glance and the shrug of the loser, the outsider, the despised minority. It is a nuance that comes most effortlessly to the oppressed.

It is ironic that Einsteins most creative work, the general theory of relativity, should boil down to conceptualizing space as a medium when his original premise [in special relativity] was that no such medium existed[..].

It was ironic that there I was finally painting the pictures I'd always wanted to paint and feeling very much at home in the countryside, and I ended up working in New York City, which is definitely the archetypal city.

There's not a lot of room for un-ironic emotion in contemporary culture. I think that irony is an important tool in dealing with the world as we find it. It's a tool of protection, but it can also be a tool of incision to get to some truth. But along the way maybe we've lost some of what I think of as the power of straightforward emotion and earnestness and seriousness.

The freedom of any society varies proportionately with the volume of its laughter.

When you go to work, if your name is on the building, you're rich. If your name is on your desk, you're middle class. And if your name is on your shirt, you're poor.

I was actually pretty miserable in high school. I couldn't wait for it to be over. And when it finally was, I remember sitting at graduation with all these classmates getting nostalgic and emotional already and all I could think was, "Get me out of here. I never want to see you people again." So it's ironic that I spend half my day putting myself back there by choice [while writing].

Most Russians don't treat the government, or those in power, as something close to them. They don't believe that they, as ordinary people, are able to change the development of things. That's why they have a very specific ironic sentiment towards power and the figures that represent it. I wanted to translate this irony into the cinematic language.

I never used to watch horror films because I was a nervous type. I believed all the publicity about The Exorcist when it was released - you know, all that nonsense about people fainting in the cinema - and decided it would definitely freak me out. I particularly remember my girlfriend telling me about Suspiria - ironic considering my first ever film work was with Argento - and how scary it was.

I could vanish the silk better than Ben Vereen - that was for sure. So I think maybe they said, "Okay, maybe he has something to offer." Years pass and I get a bit of a career, and Ben Vereen ends up hosting one of my specials where I walked through the Great Wall of China. Things came full circle in kind of an ironic way, when you have that honor of people that have influenced you so much host your show. It's a huge experience in your life.

Usually when I put my focus on the pacing, the plot, the specific characterizations, - it's ironic - but then I actually increase my chances of writing something that moves people because I haven't become too self-conscious of the goal.

I don't want to be the center of attention, which is ironic. I hate having all eyes on me - unless it's for my job, and my job is playing football. I'm not that attention-hungry.

I just really don't like being the center of attention that much. It's kind of ironic.

McDonald's being the official restaurant of the Olympics is like smoking being the official medicine of cancer.

It's more important for a photographer to have very good shoes, than to have a very good camera

People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don't realize how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world.

It's kind of ironic when I broke in at 17, I was told I was too small, too slow and I wouldn't make the NHL

I think at its best the American sense of humor is the same as the British sense of humor at its best, which is to be wry and ironic and self deprecating.

I've always been an ironic dreamer, unfaithful to my inner promises. Like a complete outsider, a casual observer of whom I thought I was, I've always enjoyed watching my daydreams go down in defeat. I was never convinced of what I believed in. I filled my hands with sand, called it gold, and opened them up to let it slide through. Words were my only truth. When the right words were said, all was done; the rest was the sand that had always been.

Count Hermann Keyserling once said truly that the greatest American superstition was the belief in facts.

The significance of man is that he is insignificant and is aware of it.

If two baseball players from the same hometown, on different teams, receive the same uniform number, it is not ironic. It is a coincidence. If Barry Bonds attains lifetime statistics identical to his father's, it will not be ironic. It will be a coincidence.

It's such an honour being banned in Italy, the mother of sensuality. It's like being asked to straighten your tie in a bordello... It's ironic that the pictures were removed on the complaint of a cardinal. I regard censorship as a cardinal sin.

It was ironic how love could awaken them to the wonders of the universe, while at the same time confine their attention to one another.

I sip my coffee. I look at the mountain, which is still doing its tricks, as you look at a still-beautiful face belonging to a person who was once your lover in another country years ago: with fond nostalgia, and recognition, but no real feelings save a secret astonishment that you are now strangers. Thanks. For the memories. It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator--our very self-consciousness--is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution, cutting us off at both ends.

I find it ironic that Republicans have such disdain for the lazy, and yet their solution to every problem is do nothing. Their answer to wealth inequality, do nothing. Health care? Do nothing. Climate change? Nothing. Racism? Doesn’t exist. For a group of people so head over heels in love with self-reliance, they sure do recommend a lot of sitting on their ass.

It was not possible for us to produce the same optimism and the same kind of humour or irony. Actually, it was not irony. Lichtenstein is not ironic but he does have a special kind of humour. That's how I could describe it: humour and optimism. For Polke and me, everything was more fragmented. But how it was broken up is hard to describe.

It's quite ironic I suppose, it's that thing about being in a group when you all start out as friends and then invariably end up hating each other. So I just thought they needed telling really, in case they were labouring under the apprehension that they were still friends.

Everybody has that thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that's what people observe. You see someone on the street and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw. It's just extraordinary that we should have been given these peculiarities. Something is ironic in the world and it has to do with the fact that what you intend never comes out like you intend it.

Taking privacy cues from the federal government is - to say the least - ironic, considering today's Orwellian level of surveillance. At virtually any given time outside of one's own home, an American citizen can reasonably assume his movements and actions are being monitored by something, by somebody, somewhere.

DJ Spooky was meant to be a kind of ironic take on that. It was always meant to be kind of a criticism and critique of how downtown culture would separate genres and styles because it was ambiguous.

It's also ironic that in the old days of tape and tape hiss and vinyl records and surface noise, we were always trying to get records louder and louder to overcome that.

I feel sorry for people who don't drink. When they wake up in the morning, that's as good as they're going to feel all day.

It’s ironic. At last I have my freedom. But at a price. Now my destiny is mine to choose. - Stanley aka Nine

People agree to say that it is rationality and science which have eliminated what is called magic and religion. But ultimately, the ironic outcome of this techno-scientific development is a renewed need for the idea of God.

Christmas is the time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell government what they want and their kids pay for it.

The Reagan Administration has fostered a climate in which a barest majority of the Supreme Court caters to the passions and hatreds of the American mob, stripping away the constitutional shield outside our bedrooms.... How tragically ironic that an Administration that promised to get Government "off our backs" is now so active in draping Government gumshoes over every part of our anatomies.

It is more than a little ironic that "capital accumulation" once a rather tendentious Marxian view of a supposed capitalist obsession, should have become - of all things - Wall Street's own slogan.

One of the functions of intelligence is to take account of the dangers that come from trusting solely to the intelligence.

That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.

Often you read something about yourself, and either you've been ironic, and that doesn't work in print, or it paraphrases something that you said, and has a different meaning.

You [men] are our protectors, is not true; for if you were, who would there be to protect us from?

I was a big and un-ironic fan of Dear Abby when I was a kid in Chicago. I think I sort of internalized her. So I have this inner Abby: cranky, proper, folksy yet scathing, with a beehive hairdo. But that's my issue.