Contradiction Quotes - Page 16

• You're always fighting the contradiction between the supposed intimacy of a two-person conversation and the blunt reality that you're trying to sell the play to people who are sitting maybe too far away from you.

  Wallace Shawn

  Fighting, Reality, Play

  Interview with Nathan Rabin, www.avclub.com. April 1, 2009.

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• I wrote to make sense out of all the contradictions I experienced and to deal with the pain and loss I was undergoing.

  Marge Piercy

  Pain, Loss, Deals

  Interview with Charlotte Templin, margepiercy.com. May 2004.

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• It is also plausible that those movements with the greatest inner contradiction and between profession and practice - that is to say with a strong feeling of guilt - are likely to be the most fervent in imposing their faith on others.

  Eric Hoffer

  Strong, Practice, Feelings

  Eric Hoffer (1980). “The True Believer”

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• One can't found a novel theology on Nothing, and nothing is so secure a foundation as a contradiction. Look at the great successes of the past--they say their deities are the masters of all the universes, and yet that they require grandmothers to defend them, as if they were children frightened by poultry. Or that the authority that punishes no one while there exists a chance for reformation will punish everyone when there is no possibility anyone will become the better for it.

  Gene Wolfe

  Children, Grandmother, Past

  Gene Wolfe (1994). “Shadow & Claw: The First Half of 'The Book of the New Sun'”, p.57, Macmillan

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• Contradictions, most of all, a balance between chaos and order. It needs neighborhoods vibrating with energy just as much as cozy little corners and parks; well-tended, middle-class sections as well as an alternative scene; technology centers for innovative youth and social facilities for older people.

  Charles Landry

  Technology, Order, Class

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• If we are perplexed by an apparent contradiction in Scripture, it is not allowable to say, 'The author of this book is mistaken'; but either the manuscript is faulty, or the translation is wrong, or you have not understood.

  Saint Augustine

  Book, Scripture, Mistaken

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• Consciousness is a state in which a man knows all at once everything that he in general knows and in which he can see how little he does know and how many contradictions there are in what he knows.

  G. I. Gurdjieff

  Men, Doe, Littles

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• It has been the bankers' destiny ... to find themselves on the dangerous edge of the world, pointing up the contradictions and cross-purposes. They are not often loved for it.

  Anthony Sampson

  Destiny, Bankers, Purpose

  Anthony Sampson (1983). “The money lenders”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

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• The practical man demands an appearance of reality at least. Always dealing in the concrete, he regards mathematical terms not as symbols or thought but as images of reality. A system acceptable to the mathematician because of its inner consistency may appear to the practical man to be full of contradictions because of the incomplete manner in which it represents reality.

  Tobias Dantzig

  Reality, Men, Consistency

  Tobias Dantzig (1954). “Number, the Language of Science: A Critical Survey Written for the Cultured Non-mathematician”

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• Obviously, anyone in contradiction with authority must possess equivalent knowledge and additional fact in order to sustain his argument.

  Samuel Homola

  Order, Facts, Argument

  Samuel Homola (1963). “Bonesetting, Chiropractic and Cultism: A Critical Study of Chiropractic, Its History and Its Methods in Its Relationship with Past and Present-day Medical Science, Along with Analyses, Conclusions and Speculation Regarding Its Status and Its Future”

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• Man can never stand still. He must find solutions to this contradiction, and ever better solutions to the extent to which reality enables him.

  Erich Fromm

  Reality, Men, Stills

  "Human Nature and Social Theory". Letter by Erich Fromm to Vladimir Dobrenkov, March 10, 1969.

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• When you're in your early 20s, a lot of characters can be one or two dimensional. You want a role to substantiate the drama, as opposed to actually analyzing the psychology of a human being. That's what drew me to acting, particularly the contradictions in people.

  Tom Hughes

  Drama, Character, Two

  Source: collider.com

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• The challenge of preventing any further proliferation of nuclear weapons is just such a trial in the quest for world peace, one that cannot be achieved if we are defeated by a sense of helplessness. The crucial element is to ensure that any struggle against evil is rooted firmly in a consciousness of the unity of the human family, something only gained through the mastery of our own inner contradictions.

  Daisaku Ikeda

  Struggle, Evil, Challenges

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• The great mathematician fully, almost ruthlessly, exploits the domain of permissible reasoning and skirts the impermissible. That his recklessness does not lead him into a morass of contradictions is a miracle in itself: certainly it is hard to believe that our reasoning power was brought, by Darwin's process of natural selection, to the perfection which it seems to possess.

  Eugene Wigner

  Believe, Perfection, Miracle

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• If you find out what it is you love to do and give your whole life to it, then there is no contradiction, and in that state your being is your doing.

  Jiddu Krishnamurti

  Life, Giving, States

  Jiddu Krishnamurti (1992). “This Matter of Culture”

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• A tension has always existed between the capitalist imperative to maximize efficiency at any cost and the moral imperatives of culture, which historically have served as a counterweight to the moral blindness of the market. This is another example of the cultural contradictions of capitalism - the tendency over time for the economic impulse to erode the moral underpinnings of society. Mercy toward the animals in our care is one such casualty.

  Michael Pollan

  Animal, Cooking, Example

  Michael Pollan (2009). “The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World”, p.161, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• The interesting thing I learned was that if you're really concerned about your health, the best decisions for your health turn out to be the best decisions for the farmers and the best decisions for the environment-and that there is no contradiction there.

  Michael Pollan

  Interesting, Decision, Environment

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• A successful work of art is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.

  Theodor Adorno

  Success, Art, Thinking

  "Essays on Music".

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• The invention of the concept of sustainable human development and that of so-called human security, as opposed to territorial security of nation- states, and its promotion by the UN is in clear contradiction to all that we, the Group of 77, and the UN Charter itself consider inalienable, namely national sovereignty and security.

  Pranab Mukherjee

  Development, Groups, Promotion

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• In matters of faith, inconvenient evidence is always suppressed while contradictions go unnoticed.

  Gore Vidal

  Matter, Evidence, Unnoticed

  Gore Vidal (1991). “A view from the diners club: essays 1987-1991”

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• Millions of Christians can and do go through life attending church, listening to sermons, reciting the creeds and never confront the seeming contradictions, redaction and myths passed off as verifiable history.

  A. N. Wilson

  Christian, Listening, Church

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• This is a world of good and evil. Wherever there is good, evil follows, but beyond and behind all these manifestations, all these contradictions, the Vedanta finds out that Unity. It says, "Give up what is evil and give up what is good." What remains then? Behind good and evil stands something which is yours, the real you, beyond every evil, and beyond every good too, and it is that which is manifesting itself as good and bad. Know that first, and then and then alone you will be a true optimist, and not before; for then you will be able to control everything.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Giving Up, Real, Evil

  Swami Vivekananda (2016). “Vivekananda Reader”, p.177, Advaita Ashrama (A publication branch of Ramakrishna Math, Belur Math)

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• A criminal trial is like a Russian novel: it starts with exasperating slowness as the characters are introduced to a jury, then there are complications in the form of minor witnesses, the protagonist finally appears and contradictions arise to produce drama, and finally as both jury and spectators grow weary and confused the pace quickens, reaching its climax in passionate final argument.

  Clifford Irving

  Drama, Confused, Character

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• I always feel that there are two choices for women. Either be totally confident about your non-size-zero body and say, 'I love what I look like and this is who I am,' or be the person who is obsessed with diet and exercise and keeping toned. What feels more realistic to me is that some days I wake up and think I love how I look. On other days I say, 'If I had real self-control, I would be 10 pounds lighter.' That contradiction is, to me, what being a girl actually feels like.

  Lena Dunham

  Girl, Zero, Real

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• The university is a vast public utility which turns out future workers in today's vineyard, the military-industrial complex. They've got to be processed in the most efficient way to see to it that they have the fewest dissenting opinions, that they have just those characteristics which are wholly incompatible with being an intellectual. This is a real internal psychological contradiction. People have to suppress the very questions which reading books raises.

  Mario Savio

  Military, Real, Reading

  "The University Has Become a Factory". Interview with Jack Fincher, Life magazine, February 26, 1965.

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