Top 100 Preposterous Quotes
#1. Our rulers at the present day, with their machines and their preachers, are all occupied in putting into our heads the preposterous notion that activity rather than contemplation is the object of life.
John Cowper Powys
#2. In love, no question is ever preposterous.
Andre Brink
#3. This is preposterous. Why would I lie? I'm not a criminal. The criminals are the ones in the cells." - Mien
"The prisoners are the ones in the cells," Skulduggery corrected. "Criminals can be anyywhere.
Derek Landy
#4. Not the least charm of this tableau is that it can be so easily dismissed as preposterous.
Charles Simic
#5. We have believed in any number of things - the tooth fairy, cold fusion, and benefits of smoking, the free lunch - that turn out not to exist. We all subscribe to preposterous beliefs; we just don't know yet which ones they are.
Stacy Schiff
#6. What men deny is not God, but some preposterous idol of the imagination.
George Tyrrell
#7. I was gazing at that full bushel of apples when she made her stunning, preposterous announcement, that I have possibly never recovered from. 'Jim it's over, and the kids and I have decided you should go.
Gabrielle Hamilton
#8. At first glance, the idea that some UFOs may be vehicles from outside the Earth seems utterly preposterous, the baseless result of wishful thinking by highly unscientific minds.
Don Berliner
#9. People believe unbelievable things because it's self-flattering to think that you are intellectually daring enough to accept what others find preposterous.
Christopher Buckley
#10. Given the manifest frailty of men, given the long succession of delusions that was their history, what could be more preposterous than claiming oneself the least deluded, let alone privy to the absolute?
R. Scott Bakker
#11. In case you're short on definitions, here's one. Insanity: 'Destroying the very things that sustain us.' And if we're so short-sighted so as to make such preposterous choices, then it's not all that preposterous to believe that shortly our end will be in sight.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#12. The censure of frequent and long parentheses has led writers into the preposterous expedient of leaving out the marks by which they are indicated. It is no cure to a lame man to take away his crutches.
Richard Whately
#13. The idea that making an activity legal would reduce its incidence is preposterous. This is exactly like the Clintonian statement about wanting to make abortion 'safe, legal and rare.' The most effective way to make something 'rare' is to make it illegal.
Ann Coulter
#14. Oh bless Speranza, for giving her son such a preposterous name as Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde.
Mary Ann Shaffer
#15. There is this feeling that I have a destiny far away from the shallow and preposterous posing that is our life ...
Kurt Vonnegut
#16. Taxation, for example, is eternally lively; it concerns nine-tenths of us more directly than either smallpox or golf, and has just as much drama in it; moreover, it has been mellowed and made gay by as many gaudy, preposterous theories
H.L. Mencken
#17. The central ideas of Christianity, an angry God and vicarious atonement, are contrary to every fact in nature, as also to the better aspirations of the human heart; they are, in our present stage of enlightenment, absurd, preposterous, and blasphemous propositions.
Virchand Gandhi
#18. The Bible takes much of its color from whoever is reading it, and it provides a text to support almost every shade of opinion, however preposterous.
Robertson Davies
#19. When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.
Donald James
#20. All this seems preposterous. But in fact one lapse of judgment can quickly create a situation in which only foolish choices are possible.
Marilynne Robinson
#21. Once in a while there are things the brain simply refuses to accept as being true because they appear too improbable, too unlikely, too preposterous.
Walter Abish
#22. Harlem was the main chance for the east end of New York, for eastsiders, as that real estate boom that took place in the 1890s - and it was a preposterous one where people bought and sold, and everything appreciated with each sale - and eventually, of course, the house of cards would crumble.
David Levering Lewis
#23. The whole story, paradoxically enough, strengthens our relish for real life. This excursion into the preposterous sends us back with renewed pleasure to the actual.
C.S. Lewis
#24. Since bodily strength is but a servant to the mind, it were very barbarous and preposterous that force should be made judge over reason.
Philip Sidney
#25. It seems preposterous now, but Amazon began as a bookstore.
George Packer
#26. The state of being in love is so inherently preposterous. It usually lends itself to romantic comedy. I think we've all been there.
James Gray
#27. Miss Wormwood: Calvin, your test was an absolute disgrace! It's obvious you haven't read any of the material. Our first president was not Chef Boy-Ar-Dee and you ought to be ashamed to have turned in such preposterous answers!
Calvin: I just don't test well.
Bill Watterson
#28. Sometimes the most preposterous lies are the most believable.
Brandon Mull
#29. Nobody knows, understands or can possibly explain why that preposterous creature does what he does. In fact there is no explanation - or better there is only one explanation: the person in question is stupid.
Carlo M. Cipolla
#30. If any preposterous bill were brought forward, for giving poor grubbing devils of authors a right to their own property I should like to say, that I for one would never consent to opposing an insurmountable bar to the diffusion of literature among the people ...
Charles Dickens
#31. They're not bombarding me with offers, although the ones that have come along have been too preposterous to contemplate, so it's not as if I spend every day resisting $20 million pay cheques.
Colin Firth
#32. We bring these delightful creatures into the world - eagerly, happily - and then before long they are spying upon and judging us, rarely favourably. Having children is our fondest wish but, in doing so, we breed our acutest critics. It is a preposterous situation - but entirely of our own making.
Whit Stillman
#33. We have 3,141 counties in this country. That would be 20 per county. The idea that we can't assimilate these 8-year-old criminals with their teddy bears is preposterous,
George Will
#34. Sleep with Seth Mortensen? Good grief. It was the most preposterous thing I'd ever heard. It was appalling. If I absorbed his life force, there was no telling how long it'd be until his next book came out.
Richelle Mead
#35. The assumption that everybody will figure out how much they have to save and then will just implement that plan is obviously preposterous.
Richard Thaler
#36. We're all so preposterous, aren't we. Holding onto our traumas, our agonies, our small dramas and using them to sabotage that which we so want, and actually deserve. ' (Petra Dussman in 'The Moment')
Douglas Kennedy
#37. Society never made the preposterous demand that a man should think as much about his own qualifications for making a charming girl happy as he thinks of hers for making himself happy.
George Eliot
#38. Well, every now and then I would hear the preposterous notion that that Jane Pauley sounds like Barbara Walters. Like I could if I tried?
Jane Pauley
#39. It's a wonderful narrative device to bring someone from the outside and look through his eyes if you want to describe the absurdity and preposterous reality that is accepted amongst the ones who are inside.
Christoph Waltz
#40. A little of this caviar finds its way to the fish restaurants around Istanbul's Taksim Square, but the bulk is sent on to the United Arab Emirates to be enjoyed by wealthy Westerners and Arabs in the preposterous hotels that have set new standards in unnecessary opulence.
Misha Glenny
#41. Whatever happens, my audience mustn't know whether I am spoofing or being serious; and likewise I mustn't know either. I am in a constant interrogation; when does the deep and philosophically valid Dali begin, and where does the looney and preposterous Dali end?
Salvador Dali
#42. I'd stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985, and stumbled out, richer, in 1988, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me me as totally preposterous-which is one reason the money was so easy to walk away from.
Michael Lewis
#43. To dare it; to get away with it, to enter on preposterous adventures in your own, but newly named, skin.
Alice Munro
#44. Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.
Kurt Vonnegut
#45. Appreciate the power of rumor, often malicious, no matter how preposterous, within the local populations you are seeking to help.
Alvin Adams
#46. But how is it your team if you don't play in it?" The boy thinks this over for a moment. Then he seems to take a firm grip on the ball. "We've supported this team for longer than most of the players in it. So it's more our team than theirs." "Preposterous," snorts Britt-Marie. In
Fredrik Backman
#47. Whatever the label on the parties, or the war cries issuing from the demagogues who lead them, the practical choice is between the plutocracy on the one side and a rabble of preposterous impossibilists on the other.
H.L. Mencken
#48. As for literary criticism in general: I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana split.
Kurt Vonnegut
#49. I wanted to be president of the United States. I really did. The older I get, the less preposterous the idea seems.
Alec Baldwin
#50. The Bible account of the creation of Eve is a preposterous fable.
Thomas Huxley
#51. When the scale of sensuality bears down that of reason, the baseness of our nature conducts us to most preposterous conclusions.
Roger Chamberlain
#52. I may say it of our preposterous use of books,
He knew not what to do, and so he read.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#53. February is a suitable month for dying. Everything around is dead, the trees black and frozen so that the appearance of green shoots two months hence seems preposterous, the ground hard and cold, the snow dirty, the winter hateful, hanging on too long.
Anna Quindlen
#54. It is preposterous that the current members of the United States Senate and all of their predecessors for more than 200 years haven't been able to read the Constitution and do what it says.
John Jay Hooker
#55. The value of failure is greatly over-rated. It's a preposterous myth.
Peter Thiel
#56. He said he had evidence that the Company was giving the opposition party money, which was just preposterous considering what bad form it would have been, trusting anybody in the Third World with money.
Marlon James
#57. I actually came to New York because it was very tolerant. You know, it seems preposterous, ludicrous thing to say in an interview, but I came for the anonymity particularly.
Deborah Eisenberg
#58. All day I have been tossed and whirled in a preposterous happiness; was it an elf in the blood? Or a bird in the brain? Or even part of the cloudily crested, fifty-league-long, loud, uplifted wave of a journeying angels transit over and through my heart?
C.S. Lewis
#59. The Court is making the preposterous assumption that the People of the United States somehow silently redefined marriage in 1868 when they ratified the 14th Amendment.
Ted Cruz
#60. But say what you will, 'tis better to be left than never to have been loved. To pass our youth in dull indifference, to refuse the sweets of life because they once must leave us, is as preposterous as to wish to have been born old, because we one day must be old.
William Congreve
#61. Give in to your passions and they will lead you to the most preposterous conclusions - passions make a fool of reason.
Christopher Moore
#62. So help me God it gets more and more preposterous, it corresponds less and less to what I remember and what I expect as if the force of live were centrifugal and threw one further and further away from one's purest memories and ambitions ...
John Cheever
#63. Read a certain way, the Natural History is preposterous, full of erroneous assumptions and cast-off mythology. Read another way, it is a window into Roman understanding two millennia ago. Read another way, it is a tribute to wonder itself
Anthony Doerr
#64. The city I inhabit now is not the city that I moved to in 1926; it has become a mean-spirited action movie complete with repulsive plot twists and preposterous dialogue.
Kathleen Rooney
#65. Isn't it sad how some people's grip on their lives is so precarious that they'll embrace any preposterous delusion rather than face an occasional bleak truth?
Bill Watterson
#66. It's always seemed a little preposterous that Hamlet, for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the reality of the ghost. Never questions his own madness might not in fact be unfeigned.
David Foster Wallace
#67. Preposterous ass, that never read so far
To know the cause why music was ordain'd!
Was it not to refresh the mind of man
After his studies or his usual pain?
(The Taming of the Shrew, 3.1.10-13), Lucentio
William Shakespeare
#68. The idea that life began with mortal birth is preposterous. There is no way to explain life if you believe that.
Boyd K. Packer
#69. OK, I've made a preposterous amount of money. But I was born with the attributes needed to do it.
John Caudwell
#70. Society would not tolerate legislation declaring that the theory that the sun circles the earth be given equal time with the theory of a heliocentric solar system; it should not pay attention to the equally preposterous notions of scientific creationism
Robert E. Ornstein
#71. Critics of NAFTA and CAFTA warned at the time that the agreements were actually a move toward ... an eventual merging of North America into a border-free area. Proponents of these agreements dismissed this as preposterous and conspiratorial. Now we see that the criticisms appear to be justified.
Ron Paul
#72. A lot of people just think that that's unreasonable or preposterous. But you know, if everybody chose to do it God's way, the world would be a lot better off.
Jase Robertson
#73. The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.
Emil Cioran
#74. Universities are no longer the intellectual centers of the country. The very idea is preposterous. Universities are the backwater. Don't look so surprised. I'm not saying anything you don't know. Since World War II, all the really important discoveries have come out of private laboratories.
Michael Crichton
#75. Here speaks Professor--' There followed a preposterous little explosion. 'I conduct the classes in Russian. Mrs Fire, who is now working at the library part-time--
Vladimir Nabokov
#76. Stop saying that! You sound absurd, and I don't even think you mean it. Besides, I'd never marry you," I told him. "I'm sixteen, and you're a slut, and you can't stop saying preposterous things!"
"True," he admitted. He kissed me on the lips and then I closed the door.
Gabrielle Zevin
#77. Advice is priceless: when it becomes interference it is preposterous.
Idries Shah
#78. "You know that it is quite preposterous of you to chase rainbows," said the sane person to the poet. "Yet it would be rather beautiful if I did one day manage to catch one," mused the poet.
Thomas William Hodgson Crosland
#79. I'm in a difficult position in the sense that, preposterous as this might sound, I don't like being the centre of attention. I get up on stage every night and play songs, but I almost feel the songs are the centre of attention. I don't like opening my birthday presents in front of people, either.
Alex Turner
#80. To argue that the gaps in knowledge which confront the seeker must be filled, not by patient inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity.
H.L. Mencken
#81. In every opportunity, question your beliefs. Don't forget that most of the beliefs are preposterous empty stories!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#82. A metaphor that works in one society may seem preposterous in another.
Max Black
#84. I believe that Jesus was, you know, the Son of God. And I understand that ... we need to be really, really respectful to people who find that ridiculous and ... preposterous.
Bono
#85. The state is an organization of mere mortals who, by one dubious method or another, have been allowed to don the mantle of political legitimacy and to command obedience on pain of imprisonment even of those who never consented to the preposterous arrangement.
Sheldon Richman
#87. The Bible writers didn't care that they were bunching together sequences some of which were historical, some preposterous, and some downright manipulative. Faithful recording was not their business; faith was.
Jeanette Winterson
#88. Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well- warmed, and well-fed.
Herman Melville
#89. It'd be preposterous for me to propose a universal cure to loneliness but I will say that people who do the things they find interesting, either creatively or vocationally, tend to become unlonely very quickly.
Douglas Coupland
#90. Take all your dukes and marquesses and earls and viscounts, pack them into one chamber, call it the House of Lords to satisfy their pride and then strip it of all political power. It's a solution so perfectly elegant and preposterous that only the British could have managed it.
Charles Krauthammer
#91. To power the country by building 186,000 fifty-story wind turbines - and running 19,000 miles of new transmission lines - just seems impractical and preposterous compared to the idea of building a hundred new nuclear facilities primarily on the sites we already have.
Lamar Alexander
#92. All inquiry into antiquity, all curiosity respecting the Pyramids, the excavated cities, Stonehenge, the Ohio Circles, Mexico, Memphis,
is the desire to do away this wild, savage, and preposterous There and Then, and introduce in its place the Here and Now.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#93. To me all palaces are preposterous, a tasteless, dreary expression of ostentation.
Charlie Chaplin
#94. Without the knowledge of the true number of the people, as a principle, the whole scope and use of keeping bills of birth and burials is impaired; wherefore by laborious conjectures and calculations to deduce the number of people from the births and burials, may be ingenious, but very preposterous.
William Petty
#95. Denying the existence of God leads us to preposterous conclusions so that, in the end, the amoral world of the skeptic who simply cannot explain good is worse than the world of the theist who has an explanation for evil.
Ravi Zacharias
#96. His "Harmonian Court of Love," in which individuals are algorithmically paired for romantic and sexual liaisons, sounded preposterous in the middle nineteenth century. Today it is the banal reality of online dating (eHarmony). Since
Chris Jennings
#97. There is indeed something preposterous about well-educated Westerners racing East in search of spiritual enlightenment while Easterners make the opposite pilgrimage seeking education and economic opportunities.
Sam Harris
#98. You will be identified as thin-skinned and moody; in reaction you will identify yourself as civilized and sensitive. You will barricade yourself in that preposterous condition known as self-respect.
Alphonso Lingis
#99. Every day each of us wakes up, reaches into drawers and closets, pulls out a costume for the day and proceeds to dress in a style that can only be called preposterous.
Mary Schmich
#100. The idea that anyone would think their religious ideas make them morally superior is just preposterous.
David O. Russell
