an irony QUOTES

1 " Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends. "

― Paul Fussell , The Great War and Modern Memory

2 " It's an irony of our times that men seeking peace must make war. "

― Mark Lawrence , Emperor of Thorns (The Broken Empire, #3)

3 " The problem is that it's hard to aim a rifle when your heart is pounding, which points to an irony of modern combat: it does extraordinarily violent things to the human body but requires almost dead calm to execute well. "

― Sebastian Junger , War

4 " It is an irony of history that the first and greatest success of scientists in persuading governments of the indispensability of modern scientific theory to society was in the war against fascism. It is an even greater and more tragic irony that it was anti-fascist scientists who convinced the American government of the feasibility and necessity of manufacturing nuclear arms, which were then constructed by an international team of largely anti-fascist scientists. "

― Eric J. Hobsbawm , How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840-2011

5 " Isn’t it an irony of the sorts that most evolved people think that they are dispensable, lesser humans think that they are indispensable, and the devolved ones think that rest are dispensable. "

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6 " There is an irony in how Christians talk about and understand sexuality. Christians often lament the world's reductionism of sex to genital interaction and raw physical pleasures, but then they typically reduce a gay person's sexuality to just that. "

― Wendy Vanderwal-Gritter , Generous Spaciousness: Responding to Gay Christians in the Church

7 " Most people don't know what they want in their life! What an irony their life has become! "

8 " He gave me the key, which I later discovered would open practically every door in the hotel. I thanked him, and I made a small mistake we irony collectors often make: I tried to share an irony with a stranger. It can’t be done. I told him I had been in the Arapahoe before—in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one. He was not interested. "

9 " There was an irony and a paradox here: Franco thought of Pontito constantly, saw it in fantasy, depicted it, as infinitely desirable – and yet he had a profound reluctance to return. But it is precisely such a paradox that lies at the heart of nostalgia – for nostalgia is about a fantasy that never takes place, one that maintains itself by not being fulfilled. And yet such fantasies are not just idle daydreams or fancies; they press toward some fulfillment, but an indirect one - the fulfillment of art. These, at least, are the terms that D. Geahchan, the French psychoanalyst, has used. With reference in particular to the greatest of nostalgies, Proust, the psychoanalyst David Werman speaks of an 'aesthetic crystallization of nostalgia' - nostalgia raised to the level of art and myth. "

― Oliver Sacks , An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales