The Preposterous Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. What landed Jesus on the cross was the preposterous idea that common, ordinary, broken, screwed-up people could be godly.

Mike Yaconelli

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.

Emil Cioran

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. In every opportunity, question your beliefs. Don't forget that most of the beliefs are preposterous empty stories!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. "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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. OK, I've made a preposterous amount of money. But I was born with the attributes needed to do it.

John Caudwell

#28. The idea that life began with mortal birth is preposterous. There is no way to explain life if you believe that.

Boyd K. Packer

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. The idea that government can instruct private enterprise on how to eliminate waste is preposterous.

James Cook

#34. And what is the state but a servant and a convenience for a large number of people, just like the electric light and the plumbing system? And wouldn't it be preposterous to claim that men must exist for their plumbing, not the plumbing for the men?

Ayn Rand

#35. Men love their ideas more than their lives. And the more preposterous the idea, the more eager they are to die for it. And to kill for it.

Edward Abbey

#36. It is preposterous to suppose that the people of one generation can lay down the best and only rules of government for all who are to come after them, and under unforeseen contingencies.

Ulysses S. Grant

#37. Horror, let's face it, is basically pretty dumb. You're writing about events that are preposterous, and the trick is to dress them up in language so compelling that the reader doesn't care.

T.E.D. Klein

#38. I read that all dogs have wolf DNA in them, which seemed preposterous because my dog, Tucker, is ... afraid of plastic bags blowing in the wind. I thought, 'How can Tucker have wolf in him? How can this be?' So I started researching it.

Bruce Cameron

#39. We could do it, you know," Gale says quietly.
"What?" I ask.
"Leave the district. Run off. Live in the woods. You and I, we could make it," says Gale.
I don't know how to respond. This idea is so preposterous.

Suzanne Collins

#40. Celebrity is absolutely preposterous. Entertainment seems to be inflating. It used to be the punctuation to your life, a film or a novel or a play, a way of celebrating a good week or month. Now it feels as if it's all punctuation.

Hugh Laurie

#41. It seems far-fetched, even preposterous, to blame the global economic order for the persistence of severe poverty in countries that are ruled by obvious thugs and crooks.

Thomas Pogge

#42. I give speeches at megachurches across America, and the one thing that's really striking about it is how utterly, completely diverse they are, and completely unself-consciously. At these huge megachurches the idea that the more Christian you are, the less tolerant you would be is preposterous.

Ann Coulter

#43. Shakespeare wrote great poetry and preposterous plays. Who really cares, for example, which petty tyrant rules Milan? Or who succeeds to the throne of Denmark? Or why the barons ganged up on Richard II?

Edward Abbey

#44. For all of its well-deserved reputation for pragmatism, American popular culture frequently nurtures or at least tolerates preposterous views and theories. Witness the 9/11 'truthers' who, lacking any evidence whatsoever, claim that 9/11 was a Bush administration plot.

Michael Hayden

#45. 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

#46. People often ask how I can reject the phrase 'woman writer' and not reject the phrase 'Jewish writer' - a preposterous question. 'Jewish' is a category of civilization, culture, and intellect, and 'woman' is a category of anatomy and physiology.

Cynthia Ozick

#47. Like Puck I like it best when things turn out preposterously.

Marty Rubin

#48. The less support an idea has,the more fervently it must be believed in, so that a totally preposterous idea requires unflinching faith.

Soren Kierkegaard

#49. The idea that anyone would think their religious ideas make them morally superior is just preposterous.

David O. Russell

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. 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

#59. Sometimes the most preposterous lies are the most believable.

Brandon Mull

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. 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

#68. There is this feeling that I have a destiny far away from the shallow and preposterous posing that is our life ...

Kurt Vonnegut

#69. 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

#70. 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

#71. 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

#72. 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

#73. 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

#74. What men deny is not God, but some preposterous idol of the imagination.

George Tyrrell

#75. 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

#76. Not the least charm of this tableau is that it can be so easily dismissed as preposterous.

Charles Simic

#77. 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

#78. 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

#79. 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

#80. 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

#81. 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

#82. 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

#83. The value of failure is greatly over-rated. It's a preposterous myth.

Peter Thiel

#84. 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

#85. 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

#86. When the scale of sensuality bears down that of reason, the baseness of our nature conducts us to most preposterous conclusions.

Roger Chamberlain

#87. The Bible account of the creation of Eve is a preposterous fable.

Thomas Huxley

#88. I wanted to be president of the United States. I really did. The older I get, the less preposterous the idea seems.

Alec Baldwin

#89. Give in to your passions and they will lead you to the most preposterous conclusions - passions make a fool of reason.

Christopher Moore

#90. 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

#91. Appreciate the power of rumor, often malicious, no matter how preposterous, within the local populations you are seeking to help.

Alvin Adams

#92. 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

#93. 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

#94. 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

#95. 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

#96. 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

#97. 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

#98. 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

#99. 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