Absurd Quotes - Page 21

• Nothing could be more absurd than an experiment in which computers are placed in a classroom where nothing else is changed.

  Seymour Papert

  Computer, Classroom, Changed

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• It is absurd to talk of one animal being higher than another...we consider those, where the intellectual faculties most developed as the highest. - A bee doubtless would [use] ... instincts as a criteria.

  Charles Darwin

  Animal, Intellectual, Use

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• If there are questions then, of course, there are answers, but the final answer makes the questions seem absurd.

  John Cage

  Finals, Answers, Courses

  John Cage (2011). “Silence: Lectures and Writings, 50th Anniversary Edition”, Wesleyan University Press

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• If you can find meaning in the type of running you need todo to stay on this team, chances are you can find meaning in another absurd pastime: Life.

  Robert Towne

  Running, Team, Needs

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• It is absurd if something that is fundamental for humanity and for its survival should in itself be defined as submission. That would mean that society can't carry on without the submission of women.

  Kristina Schroder

  Mean, Humanity, Survival

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• I am walking like a bewitched corpse, with the certainty of being eaten by the infinite, of being annulled by the only existing Absurd.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Infinite, Certainty, Walking

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• Science fiction has always had a dark side. There has been a touch of the irrational and absurd in the genre from the very beginning.

  Douglas Lain

  Dark, Sides, Fiction

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• How can a living man be a person who has nothing to lose? This is very absurd! Even a dead man has something to lose: His coffin!

  Mehmet Murat Ildan

  Men, Coffins, Nothing To Lose

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• The task I've been given seems absurd: To wait here on earth until I no longer exist.

  Ashleigh Brilliant

  Waiting, Tasks, Earth

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• The most absurd public opinion polls are those on taxes. Now, if there is one thing we know about taxes, it is that people do not want to pay them. If they wanted to pay them, there would be no need for taxes. People would gladly figure out how much of their money that the government deserves and send it in. And yet we routinely hear about opinion polls that reveal that the public likes the tax level as it is and might even like it higher. Next they will tell us that the public thinks the crime rate is too low, or that the American people would really like to be in more auto accidents.

  Llewellyn Rockwell

  Thinking, Government, People

  "Speaking of Liberty". Book by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, 2003.

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• I had to fight to be me and get respect, and to carry that stigma, for me, is pride. Carrying the tag of lesbian. I'm not bragging, I'm not preaching, but I don't deny it . I had to face society, the Church, which says damn gay people ... it's absurd. How do you judge someone who has been born that way. I did not study to be a lesbian. Neither was it taught to me. I was born this way. Since I opened my eyes to the world. I've never slept with a man. Never. I'm pure, I don't have to be ashamed ... My Gods made me so.

  Chavela Vargas

  Eye, Fighting, Pride

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• Christ . . . said that a man who had looked after a woman lustfully had sinned as much as the man who had seduced her. How absurd!

  Bertrand Russell

  Men, Christ, He Man

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• In Germany, we often hear the absurd complaint that museums don't have the money to buy paintings. Of course, I'm not talking about me and my paintings. There are, after all, more popular painters in this country.

  Georg Baselitz

  Country, Talking, Museums

  "My Paintings are Battles". Interview with Susanne Beyer, Ulrike Knöfel, www.spiegel.de. January 25, 2013.

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• In the world of 'Tim and Eric,' everything is big and ridiculous and absurd.

  Tim Heidecker

  Eric, World, Ridiculous

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• When I look back on my life nowadays, which I sometimes do, what strikes me most forcibly about it is that what seemed at the time most significant and seductive, seems now most futile and absurd. For instance, success in all of its various guises; being known and being praised; ostensible pleasures, like acquiring money or seducing women, or traveling, going to and fro in the world and up and down in it like Satan, exploring and experiencing whatever Vanity Fair has to offer. In retrospect all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called “licking the earth.

  Malcolm Muggeridge

  Exercise, Vanity, Self

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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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• Instead of asking yourself whether you believe or not, ask yourself whether you have, this day, done one thing because He said, Do it! or once abstained because He said, Do not do it! It is simply absurd to say you believe, or even want to believe, in Him, if you do not do anything He tells you.

  George MacDonald

  Believe, Asking, Done

  George Macdonald (2012). “Unspoken Sermons Series I, II, and III”, p.212, Simon and Schuster

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• For many Americans, Osama bin Laden is the paradigmatic Muslim, an absurd conviction for anyone who has lived with Muslims.

  Miroslav Volf

  Osama Bin Laden, Conviction, Bin Laden

  "Did 9/11 Make Us Morally ‘Better’" by Miroslav Volf, www.huffingtonpost.com. September 7, 2011.

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• Human relationships are patterned and cross-patterned and restricted and limited and delimited and caged and freed again by the elaborate conventions, rules and games which we call civilisation. They're often absurd and farcical, and sometimes they're tragic, yet we acknowledge that they are necessary.

  Peter Greenaway

  Games, Sometimes, Crosses

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• If you want me to explain the picture, if you put it in reality, then the mystery goes away. The situation just catches you and you think it is absurd or mysterious and you just take the picture. You dont want to see the bare reality of what happened. I took the picture as the picture, not as the realistic story of what happened.

  Eva Fuka

  Reality, Thinking, Want

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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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• We must do extraordinary things. We have to. It would be absurd not to.

  Dave Eggers

  Would Be, Extraordinary Things, Extraordinary

  "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius". Book by Dave Eggers, 2000.

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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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• It was far too absurd to die of a Tuesday

  Jamie O'Neill

  Tuesday, Dies

  Jamie O'Neill (2002). “At Swim, Two Boys: A Novel”, p.458, Simon and Schuster

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