Quotes About Contradiction

For me, the most ironic token of [the first human moon landing] is the plaque signed by President Richard M. Nixon that Apollo 11 took to the moon. It reads: We came in peace for all Mankind. As the United States was dropping 7 ½ megatons of conventional explosives on small nations in Southeast Asia, we congratulated ourselves on our humanity. We would harm no one on a lifeless rock.

The major religions on the Earth contradict each other left and right. You can't all be correct. And what if all of you are wrong? It's a possibility, you know. You must care about the truth, right? Well, the way to winnow through all the differing contentions is to be skeptical. I'm not any more skeptical about your religious beliefs than I am about every new scientific idea I hear about. But in my line of work, they're called hypotheses, not inspiration and not revelation.

A central lesson of science is that to understand complex issues (or even simple ones), we must try to free our minds of dogma and to guarantee the freedom to publish, to contradict, and to experiment. Arguments from authority are unacceptable.

The major religions on the Earth contradict each other left and right. You can't all be correct. And what if all of you are wrong? It's a possibility, you know. You must care about the truth, right?

Except by sealing the brain off into separate airtight compartments, how is it possible to fly in airplanes, listen to the radio or take antibiotics while holding that the Earth is around 10,000 years old or that all Sagittarians are gregarious and affable?

The obvious is sometimes false; the unexpected is sometimes true.

Meaning lies in the confrontation of contradiction - the coincidencia apositorum. That's what we really feel, not these rational schemes that are constantly beating us over the head with the "thou shalts" and "thou should", but rather a recovery of the real ambiguity of being and an ability to see ourselves as at once powerful and weak, noble and ignoble, future-oriented, past-facing.

Odd Thing to Read After an Autopsy: "He was in much better health than we expected." Well, yeah … except for the DEAD part.

How could something so wrong grow out of something that had started out so right?

Wizard's Ninth Rule A contradiction can not exist in reality. Not in part, nor in whole.

It struck Magda as ironic that those who professed to want peace the most were quickest to use bloodshed to try to get their way.

If our love's tragedy, why are you my remedy? If our love's insanity, why are you my clarity?

He'd been wrong, there was a light at the end of the tunnel, and it was a flamethrower.

They didn't know why these things were funny. Sometimes you laugh because you've got no more room for crying. Sometimes you laugh because table manners on a beach are funny. And sometimes you laugh because you're alive, when you really shouldn't be.

Just because it's not nice doesn't mean it's not miraculous.

Humanity's a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there.

But that was just it - hate was exactly the right word. Hate is a force of attraction. Hate is just love with its back turned.

This is Art holding a Mirror up to Life. That's why everything is exactly the wrong way around.

Then there was the puzzle of why the sun came out during the day, instead of at night when the light would come in useful.

He'd wanted changes. It was just that he'd wanted things to stay the same, as well.

Oh, well...up until now it had been a good day, in a horrible kind of way.

Between every rational moment were a billion irrational ones.

Captain Vimes believed in logic, in much the same way as a man in a desert believed in ice -- i.e., it was something he really needed, but this just wasn't the world for it.

Rincewind's feet made their own decision and, from the point of view of his head, got it entirely wrong.