"What gets measured gets managed."
Ironic quotes
Ironic
273 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Ironic quotes (page 1 of 14)
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"For an adult, eating alone at McDonald's is admitting a kind of defeat."
"Irony is a disciplinarian feared only by those who do not know it, but cherished by those who do. He who does not understand irony and has no ear for its whispering lacks of what might called the absolute beginning of the personal life. He lacks what at moments is indispensable for the personal life, lacks both the regeneration and rejuvenation, the cleaning baptism of irony that redeems the soul from having its life in finitude though living boldly and energetically in finitude."
"With fame I become more and more stupid, which of course is a very common phenomenon."
"It’s pretty ironic that the so-called ‘least advanced’ people are the ones taking the lead in trying to protect all of us, while the richest and most powerful among us are the ones who are trying to drive the society to destruction."
"It was ironic; he held her captive, yet she’d captivated him."
"It is an old and ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way; and we grasp more fiercely at research, statistics, and technical aids in sex when we have lost the values and meaning of love."
"It is a little ironic that one thing a babysitter should not do is sit on a baby."
"We all feel like idiots at one time or another. Even if we feel we're cool 98 percent of the time, that 2-percent doofus is poised to take over our bodies without any warning."
"Religion is the worst thing that ever happened to mankind - the ironic part is that it's presented as a good thing, and its effect is absolutely catastrophic to individuals and to societies."
"Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory."
"In our native terms, the ironic style is often compounded with the sardonic and the hard-boiled; even the effortlessly superior. But irony originates in the glance and the shrug of the loser, the outsider, the despised minority. It is a nuance that comes most effortlessly to the oppressed."
"Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism -- victimless collecting, as it were... in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments."
"I've always been an ironic dreamer, unfaithful to my inner promises. Like a complete outsider, a casual observer of whom I thought I was, I've always enjoyed watching my daydreams go down in defeat. I was never convinced of what I believed in. I filled my hands with sand, called it gold, and opened them up to let it slide through. Words were my only truth. When the right words were said, all was done; the rest was the sand that had always been."
"What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written."
"Nobody can tell what I suffer! But it is always so. Those who do not complain are never pitied."
"Irony is a disciplinarian feared only by those who do not know it, but cherished by those who do"
"Those who do not complain are never pitied."
"It is respectable to have no illusions, and safe, and profitable and dull."
"The prince of darkness is a gentleman!"
"I once sent a dozen of my friends a telegram saying 'flee at once - all is discovered.' They all left town immediately."