Top 100 Quotes About Irony
#1. We Americans only voted for George Bush to prove to the British that Americans understand irony. Unfortunately, it kinda backfired.
Scott Capurro
#2. Not every book has to be loaded with symbolism, irony, or musical language, but it seems to me that every book-at least every one worth reading-is about something.
Stephen King
#3. Irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It's critical and destructive, a ground-clearing
David Foster Wallace
#4. Outwardly, I hope, I wear my usual mask of detachment, even irony, for there has never been a situation,however dire, even this one, that did not strike me as containing at least some element of the human comedy.
Robert Harris
#5. Perhaps the saddest irony of depression is that suicide happens when the patient gets a little better and can again function sufficiently.
Dick Cavett
#6. The irony is that the person not taking risks feels the same amount of fear as the person who regularly takes risks.
Peter McWilliams
#7. I threw my hands on my hips, shocked by the irony. A Mather helping a Greensmith? Hell was freezing over somewhere beneath our feet and every kind of farm animal was sprouting wings to fly.
Leigh Goff
#8. Irony is the cultivation of the spirit and therefore follows next after immediacy; then comes the ethicist, then the humourist, then the religious person.
Soren Kierkegaard
#9. I think there's something in common with the OSS 117 movies. The big difference is there's no irony in this one. It's not parody. I tried to make it very simple. It's a simple story, but to be simple, it's very complex in the way it's done.
Michel Hazanavicius
#11. But the irony is they think they're being tough on ISIS and Trump thinks he's being tough on ISIS. Senator Rubio in his interview with you touched on it very, very lightly.
Ted Koppel
#12. The irony of life is to realize that you live only to die.
Nely Cab
#13. I've learned not to hide behind a veil of irony - to talk about my work in a more honest way.
Florence Welch
#14. A whirl of thick flakes emerged from an irony-grey infinity, almost obscuring Granta House.
Jojo Moyes
#15. The irony about selling out is that they only call you a sell-out when your stuff finally sells - I've had products bearing my name since I was 14, but nobody was buying them then.
Tony Hawk
#16. The irony of justice is that the feelings that precede it and those which fruit from it are never fair and balanced.
Cecelia Ahern
#17. Making a film that's supposed to be fun to watch is really hard - that's the weird irony of it.
Steven Soderbergh
#18. Not to mention the fact that your uncle seems determined to drink away the coffers of House Jacos." Another swig of gin. Coriane almost laughed at the irony. "How selfish.
Victoria Aveyard
#19. There is nothing absolute and final. If everything were ironclad, all the rules absolute and everything structured so no paradox or irony existed, you couldn't move. One could say that man sneaks through the crack where paradox exists.
Itzhak Bentov
#20. The newly-minted captain admits the irony between the gold on his shoulders and the lack of gold in his pockets.
Patrick O'Brian
#21. Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#22. His job was the very least important part of his life, never to be mentioned except in irony.
Richard Yates
#23. A good conversation is the only human equivalent: the realizing that decent points are being made and understood, that irony is in play, and elaboration, and that a dull and obvious remark would be almost physically hurtful.
Christopher Hitchens
#24. It's no small irony that the government inevitably and invariably ends up promoting precisely that which they would most like to repress.
Jock Sturges
#25. I still see the world as a place of bitter irony and black humour, failed hopes, dashed plans. I hope to make my work sparer, to outgrow my desire to show off.
Clive Sinclair
#26. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony.
Frederick Douglass
#27. I'm really into the irony of writing vaguely radical plays that instantly win huge establishment awards. It's really amusing.
Israel Horovitz
#28. The irony of New Testament lordship is that only in slavery to Christ can a man discover authentic freedom.
R.C. Sproul
#29. As for George Bush of Kennebunkport, Maine- personally I think he's further evidence that the Great Scriptwriter in the Sky has an overdeveloped sense of irony.
Molly Ivins
#30. Some irony. The girl who couldn't face her own bullshit . . . suddenly forcing everyone else to.
Rick Remender
#32. The definition of black irony is Pro-lifers killing Doctors who do abortions
Bill Hicks
#34. She believed that the arrogance of humankind created a deadly irony: in their determination to control nature, human beings posed a growing threat to all life on earth, including their own.
Mark Hamilton Lytle
#35. The irony here is we're looking for water and we're looking out for water. Without it you die, and with too much of it you die.
Cody Lundin
#36. The irony of primary parent laws is that on the one hand feminists were arguing for women's equal rights to jointly-created career assets that emanated from the male financial womb, but arguing against men's equal rights to jointly-created children that emanated from the woman's child-bearing womb.
Warren Farrell
#38. Sylvia's inherent appreciation for beauty as both artist and consumer is evident in her journals and letters ... ... .she wrote beautifully about clothes. She wrote about them with irony and wit mixed in with all the rococo prettiness.
Elizabeth Winder
#39. Everyone is tearing each other apart in the name of their personal god. And the irony is, by definition, they're probably worshiping the same god.
Ridley Scott
#40. Experiences that banish irony are much better for living than for writing.
Michael Pollan
#41. If you have a kid and you try irony out on them, they don't get it at 7, 8 years old. You can't really hide the Internet from kids. It worries me some particularly because I've done Disney and Pixar stuff.
Randy Newman
#42. The huge irony is that the more the gospel is offered in consumer terms, the more the consumers are disappointed.
Eugene H. Peterson
#43. I was as real to him as he was to me and it struck me just then that I meant something to him. In whatever capacity he was able, I meant something. The irony of that epiphany made my gut twist.
C.J. Roberts
#44. The naive is what is or appears to be natural, individual, or classical to the point of irony or to the point of continuous alternation of self-creation and self-destruction. If it is only instinct, then it is childlike, childish, or silly; if it is only intention, it becomes affectation.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#45. Henry Blodget does occasionally have a new idea. If you're making a point about aggregation or the emptiness of modern journalism, he's far from the best target. Try Huffpo - or Gawker writers whose souls have been corroded by irony.
Nick Denton
#46. The presence of irony does not necessarily mean that the earnestness is excluded. Only assistant professors assume that.
Soren Kierkegaard
#47. It is hard to miss the irony in the fact that the very same week that Republicans were publicly heralding Congressman Paul Ryan's plan to inject market forces into the American health care system, they were crafting a budget deal to strip them from the health reform law.
Ron Wyden
#48. Be extremely careful when using irony: bear in mind that irony might be an overture for sarcasm
Eraldo Banovac
#49. When irony first makes itself known in a young man's life, it can be like his first experience of getting drunk; he has met with a powerful thing which he does not know how to handle.
Robertson Davies
#50. I hope you're appreciating the rich irony here: hospitals and doctors are using the Medicare subsidy (Medicare is the federal agency that doles out the HITECH dollars) to buy computer systems that allow them to bill Medicare more effectively.
Robert Wachter
#51. The other thing I said is the great irony is you will be back fighting against your own weapons. Had [Bashar] Assad been bombed when he used chemical weapons two years ago, ISIS would be in charge of all of Syria now.
Rand Paul
#52. I love her more than I actually express in words - an irony for a writer - and am every day genuinely amazed I get to spend my life with her.
John Scalzi
#53. Where does a young lady in Wakefield, Connecticut, purchase combat boots?" "Goodwill," she said. "You're wearing Goodwill combat boots?" "Yes." "Congratulations, Eleanor. Your footwear has achieved irony." Before
Tiffany Reisz
#54. That is where the irony of the film comes off, in terms of the language it employs - where he tries desperately to be a 'TV Dad,' to give advice and it's so pat it becomes ridiculous.
Atom Egoyan
#55. What is bad for the heart is good for art. The terrible irony of our lives as artists.
Jandy Nelson
#56. Poetry teaches us things that cannot be learned in prose, such as certain kinds of irony or the importance of the unsaid. The most important element of any poem is the part that is left unsaid. So the poetry frames the experience that lies beyond naming.
Sam Hamill
#57. The irony is that you can't use real rain to make movies.
Greg Kinnear
#58. In hindsight, I must have been looking for a way to write about Jewishness that somehow managed to minimize irony and self-deprecation.
Zachary Lazar
#59. We're not big on irony in Jamaica, sarcasm and double-talk. We tend to say things plainly, sometimes to the point of boredom.
Marlon James
#60. Irony limits, finitizes, and circumscribes and thereby yields truth, actuality, content; it disciplines and punishes and thereby yields balance and consistency.
Soren Kierkegaard
#61. The irony is that the more unapologetically sexist men are in movies, the more women tend to be attracted to them in person.
Jon Favreau
#62. The deeper irony is that the evidence of sin that are always found in and around the body of Christ may become indirect intimations of its holiness. It could not be a holy church if it had clean hands, as if severed from its task of saving sinners and healing human hurt.
Thomas C. Oden
#63. Considering our backgrounds, I found it a strange irony that Ian and I should meet in central Borneo. Both of us were set in motion by the war in Southeast Asia. Ian enlisted. I left the country several weeks before an FBI agent arrived at my parents' front door.
Eric Hansen
#64. There are elements of irony in my work, of course.
Martin Parr
#65. Irony is the hardest addiction of all. Forget heroin. Just try giving up irony, the deep-down need to mean two things at once, to be in two places at once, not to be there for the catastrophe of a fixed meaning.
Edward St. Aubyn
#66. And the irony is that they wrote better without access to my quotes.
Steve Carlton
#67. None other than the Skeptic's Dictionary points out an obvious and troubling irony: "When spoken by schizophrenics, glossolalia is recognized as gibberish. In charismatic Christian communities glossolalia is sacred and referred to as 'speaking in tongues' or having 'the gift of tongues.
John F. MacArthur Jr.
#68. She heard irony in his tone and the bitter pain gliding, sharklike, beneath it.
Nancy Baker
#69. Sam Keen points out that Zen masters spend years to reach an enlightenment that every natural child already knows - the total incarnation of sleeping when you're tired and eating when you're hungry. What irony that this state of Zen-like bliss is programmatically and systematically destroyed.
John Bradshaw
#70. But the irony is that unless God's in the center of it, you can get singed pretty badly.
Julie Lessman
#71. In a world where irony reigns, where you have to separate, protect and laugh at anything that is honest or has an emotional charge, I bet for catharsis. I like to invest emotionally in things. And catharsis, when it touches the emotional vein, can open the doors of even those who protect themselves.
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
#72. That was it exactly - irony was defeatist, timid, the telltale of a generation too afraid to say what it meant, and so in danger of forgetting it had anything to say.
D.T. Max
#73. The irony was not lost on any of us that despite the theme there was a robot on the throne.
Kathryn Davis
#74. Moreover, although the people are guilty, Peter understands that it was precisely through the evil execution of Jesus that "God fulfilled what he had foretold through all the prophets, saying that his Christ would suffer" (3:18). That is the supreme irony of all history.
D. A. Carson
#75. Worrying about what other people think is a jail of our own creation, and the irony of it is those people are in the same jail with us.
Srinivas Rao
#76. The irony of instant gratification is that it leaves such lasting scars.
Heather King
#77. My friend "M" says the irony of being a zombie is that everything is funny, but you can't smile, because your lips have rotted off.
Isaac Marion
#78. I'll project myself into several futures simultaneously," I should have said, "a minor tremor in my hand; I'll work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city, a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid.
Ben Lerner
#79. God, what a depressing day that was and what an irony that Britain's first female prime minister had to be Margaret Thatcher. She was the woman who asked, 'What has feminism ever done for me?' Well, dear, if you need to ask that question then you're obviously not very bright
Jo Brand
#80. It was an exquisite irony: Just when we stopped wanting to kill ourselves, we started to die. Just when we were feeling strenght, it was taken from us.
David Levithan
#81. The cruel irony of housework:
people only notice when you don't do it.
Danielle Raine
#82. Sadness is the matrix from which wit and irony spring; sadness is uncomfortable and creative, which is why consumer society cannot tolerate it.
Germaine Greer
#83. There's something about Vonnegut's deadpan irony that I really like. And I like Borges' puzzle structure.
Ruth Ozeki
#84. In acting, you have a writer, a director, a character - you're working through being another person - and the irony I always tell people is when I acted early on as a teenager, it actually kept me out of trouble.
Juliette Lewis
#85. The sad irony is that the views of the liberty-first advocates are more likely to lead to socialism or totalitarianism than those of the people they criticize for being socialists.
Howard I. Schwartz
#86. It is the whole modern concept of love which should be re-examined, such as is commonly but transparently expressed in phrases like 'love at first sight' and 'honeymoon'. All this shoddy terminology is on top of that tainted with the most reactionary irony.
Andre Breton
#87. There is, of course, a deep irony in the fact that technology, which was supposed to cut the ties between people and places and allow people everywhere to work from almost anywhere, turns out to flourish in fairly compact geographic locations.
Bruce Katz
#88. A sharp sense of the ironic can be the equivalent of the faith that moves mountains. Far more quickly than reason or logic, irony can penetrate rage and puncture self-pity.
Moss Hart
#89. Dangerously well' - what an irony is this: it expresses precisely the doubleness, the paradox, of feeling 'too well
Oliver Sacks
#90. We often assume that the question, "How can I be happy?" can be successfully answered without reference to the love of God and our neighbors. And the irony is that if our biggest question is our own happiness, we can never know the God in whom we find our ultimate joy and rest.
Michael S. Horton
#91. Americans are not renowned for having a sense of irony.
Andrew Dominik
#92. Was Mann himself fully aware of all the facets of his irony? Probably not - any more than Shakespeare was fully aware of all the riches subsequent critics have found in his plays.
Philip Kitcher
#93. My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch.
Jack Nicholson
#94. It is a beautiful irony that the great queen we've ever had is the first to take off her crown.
Marissa Meyer
#95. A third variety of drama ... begins as tragedy with scraps of fun in it ... and ends in comedy without mirth in it, the place of mirth being taken by a more or less bitter and critical irony.
George Bernard Shaw
#96. Seeing any war through the distortion of comedy is healthy. There is just too much absurdity and irony at play in a combat zone not to pay attention to it. At least that's how it struck me; others may have had an entirely different war experience.
Dave Abrams
#97. Our prayers for the evangelization of the world are but a bitter irony so long as we only give of our superfluity and draw back before the sacrifice of ourselves.
Amy Carmichael
#98. We are each unique ... which is why it is so wrong to be lumped together by stereotypes or viewed with narrowed expectations based on skin color or chromosomes. The irony is that dealing with this prejudice becomes our shared experience.
Sheryl Sandberg
#99. Irony - The modern mode: either the devil's mark or the snorkel of sanity.
Julian Barnes
#100. It wouldn't be the first time she had seen herself obliged to accept with smothered irony other people's interpretation of her conduct. She often ended by giving up to them --it seemed really the way to live --the version that met their convenience.
Henry James
