Absurd Quotes - Page 16

• National Socialism is what Marxism might have been if it could have broken its absurd and artificial ties with a democratic order.

  Adolf Hitler

  Order, Ties, Broken

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• In particular, it is absurd to hope to banish envy of other people's possessions or fortunes, if only because the spirit of envy can lead to emulation and ambition and have positive consequences.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Ambition, People, Envy

  Christopher Hitchens (2011). “God is Not Great”, p.74, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• I must confess that I and a few others are burdened with heavy responsibilities regarding the future of criticism. I am certainly, if not the inventor, then at least one of the first systematizers of an absurd critical practice that, as soon as it had peeked its beak out of the nest, flapping its new wet wings, took flight in the minds of the young, becoming a wild ox and sowing avant-garde literature with the mighty tomes of what might as well be called the abstract bear.

  Louis Aragon

  Responsibility, Practice, Wings

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• To suppose that man without language taught himself to speak, seems to me as absurd as it would be to suppose that without legs he could teach himself to walk. Language, therefore, must have been the immediate gift of God.

  Noah Webster

  Men, Would Be, Legs

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• Nor, in truth, is it of little importance to prevent the suspicion of any difference having arisen between us from being handed down in any way to our posterity; for it is worse than absurd that parties should be found disagreeing on the very principles, after we have been compelled to make our departure from the world.

  John Calvin

  Party, Differences, Departure

  Letter to Philip Melanchthon, November 28, 1552.

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• All his leisure clothes were absurd - jokes, really - as though leisure itself had to be ridiculed.

  Edmund White

  Clothes, Leisure, Jokes

  Edmund White (2016). “A Boy's Own Story: Picador Classic”, p.10, Pan Macmillan

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• From the fame opinion of a soul distinct from the body came the practice of praying, first for the dead, and then to them with a long train of other absurd opinions, and superstitious practices.

  Joseph Priestley

  Practice, Long, Soul

  Joseph Priestley (1782). “An History of the Corruption of Christianity”, p.442

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• If an art has for its function to represent manners and people, I do not see how it can avoid systematizing its sensibility to the extent of showing some figures much as Molière, for instance, did, as absurd or detestable.

  Wyndham Lewis

  Art, People, Manners

  Wyndham Lewis (1929). “The Diabolical Principle and The Dithyrambic Spectator”, p.38, Ardent Media

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• The day will come, sooner or later, when people will wonder at the necessity of taking all this trouble to expose the folly of a system, so childish and absurd, and yet so often enforced at the point of a bayonet.

  Jean-Baptiste Say

  People, Bayonets, Wonder

  Jean Baptiste Say, Clement Cornell Biddle (1851). “A treatise on political economy”, p.159

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• Anarcho-capitalism, in my opinion, is a doctrinal system which, if ever implemented, would lead to forms of tyranny and oppression that have few counterparts in human history. There isn't the slightest possibility that its (in my view, horrendous) ideas would be implemented, because they would quickly destroy any society that made this colossal error. The idea of 'free contract' between the potentate and his starving subject is a sick joke, perhaps worth some moments in an academic seminar exploring the consequences of (in my view, absurd) ideas, but nowhere else.

  Noam Chomsky

  Errors, Views, Ideas

  "On Anarchism". Interview with Tom Lane, chomsky.info. December 23, 1996.

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• It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing. I don’t think the novels of Jane Austen could have been written by a man nor the stories of Ernest Hemingway by a woman, and in the same way I believe the author of the James Tiptree stories is male.

  Robert Silverberg

  Believe, Writing, Men

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• Our researchers into Public Opinion are content That he held the proper opinions for the time of year; When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went. He was married and added five children to the population, Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation, And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education. Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd: Had everything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

  W. H. Auden

  Teacher, Children, War

  "The Unknown Citizen" l. 22 (1939)

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• Rationally considered, nothing can be more absurd than the baptism of infants under any circumstances. No statement, no matter by whom it may be said to have been uttered, can make that true which is radically false. If an innocent child, unconscious of good or evil, irresponsible to God and man, incapable of thought or action, is not already, in accordance with Christian theology, a member of Christ, then no vicarious promise or priestly ablution can make him one. For if this were so, a similar ceremony under devil worship could make him a member of Satan.

  Tennessee Celeste Claflin

  Christian, Children, Men

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• The best thing about religion is that it's so transparently absurd it can't possibly last forever. I'm convinced it will only take a small shift in human consciousness for it to be laughed off the planet, and I hope I'm still around when that happens.

  Pat Condell

  Forever, Religion, Lasts

  "Laughing religion off the planet with Pat Condell". Interview with Dave Mckeegan, freethinker.co.uk. February 27, 2008.

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• The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious.

  Albert Camus

  Fate, Tasks, Rare Moments

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays”, p.121, Vintage

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• My happiest hours are those in which I think nothing, want nothing, when I do not even dream, but lose myself in some spurious vegetable torpor, moss growing on the surface of life. Without a trace of bitterness I savour my absurd awareness of being nothing, a mere foretaste of death and extinction.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Dream, Thinking, Vegetables

  Fernando Pessoa (2010). “The Book of Disquiet”, p.50, Profile Books

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• I think it better to keep a profound silence with regard to the Christian fables, which are canonized by their antiquity and the credulity of absurd and insipid people.

  Frederick The Great

  Christian, Thinking, People

  Letter 37 to Voltaire on June 1738. "Letters of Voltaire and Frederick the Great", translated by Richard Aldington, 1927.

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• We are surrounded by the absurd excess of the universe. By meaningless bulk, vastness without size, power without consequence. The stubborn iteration that is present without being felt. Nothing the spirit can marry. Merely phenomenon and its physics. An endless, endless of going on. No habitat where the brain can recognize itself. No pertinence for the heart. Helpless duplication.

  Jack Gilbert

  Heart, Brain, Habitat

  Jack Gilbert (2012). “Collected Poems”, p.293, Knopf

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• Life might just be an absurd, even crude, chain of events and nothing more.

  Haruki Murakami

  Events, Might, Existentialism

  Haruki Murakami (2011). “1Q84:”, p.272, Random House

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• Since man, fragment of the universe, is governed by the same laws that preside over the heavens, it is by no means absurd to search there above for the themes of our lives, for those frigid sympathies that participate in our achievements as well as our blunderings.

  Marguerite Yourcenar

  Mean, Men, Law

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• The belief that rational and quantifiable disciplines such as science can be used to perfect human society is no less absurd than a belief in magic, angels, and divine intervention.

  Chris Hedges

  Atheist, Angel, Perfect

  Chris Hedges (2009). “When Atheism Becomes Religion: America's New Fundamentalists”, p.13, Simon and Schuster

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• Peace is absurd: Fascism does not believe in it.

  Benito Mussolini

  War, Believe, Doe

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• If God created the universe, there was a time when he commenced to create. Back of that commencement there must have been an eternity. In that eternity what was this God doing? He certainly did not think. There was nothing to think about. He did not remember. Nothing had ever happened. What did he do? Can you imagine anything more absurd than an infinite intelligence in infinite nothing wasting an eternity?

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Thinking, Infinite Intelligence, Remember

  Robert Green Ingersoll (1907). “The works of Robert G. Ingersoll”, p.324, Library of Alexandria

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• A creative train of thought is set off by: the unexpected, the unknown, the accidental, the disorderly, the absurd, the impossible.

  Asger Jorn

  Train Of Thought, Creative, Unexpected

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• The (capital punishment) controversy passes the anarch by. For him, the linking of death and punishment is absurd. In this respect, he is closer to the wrongdoer than to the judge, for the high-ranking culprit who is condemned to death is not prepared to acknowledge his sentence as atonement; rather, he sees his guilt in his own inadequacy. Thus, he recognizes himself not as a moral but as a tragic person.

  Ernst Junger

  Punishment, Judging, Guilt

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