Quotes About Contradiction

People are mostly layers of violence and tenderness wrapped like bulbs, and it is difficult to say what makes them onions or hyacinths.

Living is abnormal.

For every un-universe, then, an un-philosophy that must also negate itself.

Bartleby's paradox: acceptance through refusal.

Voltaire once described optimism as "a cruel philosophy with a consoling name," which immediately suggests what pessimism might be: a consoling philosophy with a cruel name.

Isn't hate—twisted love?

And guess what he finds. Nothing. And I mean that literally. Not a de Brogliesque absence of presence but a Tertullian presence of absence.

You're not as cold as you pretend to be,' she said. 'I think your doors open in different places, that's all. Most people just don't know how to get in to you. They knock and they knock where the door is supposed to be, but it's a blank wall. But you're there. I've watched you. I've seen you do some awfully cold things warmly and some warm things coldly. Or does that make sense?

I come from a Catholic religion, but I'm not Catholic.

We are not against religions. This country is the cradle of prophecy and the true message and we will not contradict this.

My parents are like religious atheists.

I can remember when the air was clean and sex was dirty.

When you cover the economy as a reporter, there's one part of the job that is always easy: finding economists who disagree.

I am much more radical in my beliefs than my products represent me to be.

My mom was very much the product of a very paternalistic, deep-southern culture, but also a repressed feminist. Her way of being defiant was to raise us to be rebellious ourselves - basically, the opposite of who she had to be in her own life.

Your experience is a dream; so is my experience. This stuff about how the frontal cortex is repressed during dreaming, lucid dreaming presents an obvious contradiction to it. The only difference is sensory input.

The only way to be punk rock in L.A. is to be a Republican.

You cross me, I'm going to hurt you. But I'm really very gentle.

Life is itself an occupational hazard. Sometimes the things we love hurt us. Embracing and navigating around that contradiction is part of what it is to be alive.

Hypocrisy is great fodder for comedy.

This is America; our icons are complicated.

There is no dream of love, however ideal it may be, which does not end up with a fat, greedy baby hanging from the breast.

I do not believe in the eternity of the spirit. That contradicts my ideology.

The language of the moment or, as it were, the language of the order in which we live, is the image. I felt that if I wanted to commune with the public, I should best do so through the language of image. It's a conscious embrace of a contradiction.