Absurdities Quotes

If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities. ~ Voltaire

The take-home message is that we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism - as though that were some kind of terrible perversion of real, decent religion. Voltaire got it right long ago: 'Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.' So did Bertrand Russell: 'Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do. ~ Richard Dawkins

It is with philosophy as with religion : men marvel at the absurdity of other people's tenets, while exactly parallel absurdities remain in their own. ~ John Stuart Mill

Intelligent, thinking people could take things like this in their stride, just as they took the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs. Economic circumstances might force you to live in this environment, but the important thing was to keep from being contaminated. The important thing, always, was to remember who you were. ~ Richard Yates

The idea that each corporation can be a feudal monarchy and yet behave in its corporate action like a democratic citizen concerned for the world we live in is one of the great absurdities of our time - ~ Kim Stanley Robinson

In our search for more, we have blinded ourselves to our personal responsibility for challenging these absurdities. A resource-based society considers us all equal shareholders of Earth. We are responsible both for the planet and for our relationship with each other. ~ Jacque Fresco

When a mere girl, my mother offered me a dollar if I would read the Bible through; ... despairing of reconciling many of its absurd statements with even my childish philosophy, ... I became a sceptic, doubter, and unbeliever, long ere the 'Good Book' was ended. ~ Elmina Drake Slenker

No men deserve the title of infidels so little as those to whom it has been usually applied; let any of those who renounce Christianity, write fairly down in a book all the absurdities that they believe instead of it, and they will find that it requires more faith to reject Christianity than to embrace it. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

Absolutism, in both religious and political idealism, is a splendid incentive to heroic action, but a dangerous guide in immediate and concrete situations. In religion, it permits absurdities and in politics cruelties, which fail to achieve justifying consequences because the inertia of human nature remains a nemesis to the absolute ideal...The fanaticism which in the individual may appear in the guise of a harmless or pathetic vagary, when expressed in political policy, shuts the gates of mercy on mankind. ~ Gustav Niebuhr

On the other hand, he was also enjoying the ecstasy of an idea, not daring just yet to envision its complications, dangers, and vicious absurdities. For now, the idea was enough. It was indestructible. Transforming it into reality, well, that was something else altogether. For now, though, let's let him enjoy it. ~ Markus Zusak

I don't think there's just one person for everyone. It would be very hard for me to be with a guy who was not bright or funny. And he'd have to see the absurdities of the world, not exactly as I see them necessarily. ~ Erica Jong

For me, comedy starts as a spew, a kind of explosion, and then you sculpt it from there, if at all. It comes out of a deeper, darker side. Maybe it comes from anger, because I'm outraged by cruel absurdities, the hypocrisy that exists everywhere, even within yourself, where it's hardest to see. ~ Robin Williams

Absurdities die of self-strangulation. ~ Thomas Chandler Haliburton

The inner defenses are unconscious. They consist of a kind of magic aura which the mind builds around cherished belief. Arguments which penetrate into the magic aura are not dealt with rationally but by a specific type of pseudo-reasoning. Absurdities and contradictions are made acceptable by specious rationalizations. ~ Arthur Koestler

Narrative storytelling enables us to derive ideas from the disparate facts, incongruent motives, conflicting emotions, and other absurdities inherent in living dynamically. The narrative that we select to tell our life story acts as a lens that assigns value to our shape shifting experiences: it pulls humor from catastrophes; it places a patina of irony over our checkered history; it allows us to explore our pessimism; and it provides a platform from which vantage point we can optimistically view the future. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

What monstrous absurdities and paradoxes have resisted whole batteries of serious arguments, and then crumbled swiftly into dust before the ringing death-knell of a laugh! ~ Agnes Repplier

The philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday has become the wisdom of tomorrow. ~ William Osler

To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art, if my position is correct. ~ Mark Twain

Whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by absurdities. ~ Bertrand Russell

The strife of politics tends to unsettle the calmest understanding, and ulcerate the most benevolent heart. There are no bigotries or absurdities too gross for parties to create or adopt under the stimulus of political passions. ~ Edwin Percy Whipple

One is more certain to influence men, to produce more effect on them, by absurdities than by sensible ideas. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

I live in two worlds. One is a world of books. I've been a resident of Faulkner's Yoknapatowpha County, hunted the white whale aboard the Pequod, fought alongside Napoleon, sailed a raft with Huck and Jim, committed absurdities with Ignatius J. Reilly, rode a sad train with Anna Karenina, and strolled down Swann's Way. ~ Rory Gilmore

If Shakespeare be considered as a MAN born in a rude age and educated in the lowest manner, without any instruction either from the world or from books, he may be regarded as a prodigy; if represented as a POET capable of furnishing a proper entertainment to a refined or intelligent audience, we must abate much of this eulogy. In his compositions, we regret that many irregularities, and even absurdities, should so frequently disfigure the animated and passionated scenes intermixed with them; and, at the same time, we perhaps admire the more those beauties on account of their being surrounded by such deformities. A striking peculiarity of sentiment, adapted to a single character, he frequently hits, as it were, by inspiration; but a reasonable propriety of thought he cannot for any time uphold. Nervous and picturesque expressions as well as descriptions abound in him; but it is in vain we look either for purity or simplicity of diction. His total ignorance of all theatrical art and conduct, however material a defect, yet, as it affects the spectator rather than the reader, we can more easily excuse than that want of taste which often prevails in his productions, and which gives way only by intervals to the irradiations of genius. [....] And there may even remain a suspicion that we overrate, if possible, the greatness of his genius; in the same manner as bodies often appear more gigantic on account of their being disproportioned and misshapen. ~ David Hume

I feel completely at home in the absurdities of India. ~ Upamanyu Chatterjee

The world stands on absurdities, and without them perhaps nothing at all would happen. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The marvellous logic of the mad which seems to mock that of the logicians because it resembles it so exactly, or rather because it is exactly the same, and because at the secret heart of madness, at the core of so many errors, so many absurdities, so many words and gestures without consequence, we discover, finally, the hidden perfection of a language. ~ Michel Foucault

At first Christ was a man – nothing more. Mary was his mother, Joseph his father. The genealogy of his father, Joseph, was given to show that he was of the blood of David.
Then the claim was made that he was the son of God, and that his mother was a virgin, and that she remained a virgin until her death.

The claim was made that Christ rose from the dead and ascended bodily to heaven.
It required many years for these absurdities to take possession of the minds of men.
If he really ascended, why did he not do so in public, in the presence of his persecutors? Why should this, the greatest of miracles, be done in secret, in a corner?

Is Christ our example? He never said a word in favor of education. He never even hinted at the existence of any science. He never uttered a word in favor of industry, economy or of any effort to better our condition in this world. He was the enemy of the successful, of the wealthy. Dives was sent to hell, not because he was bad, but because he was rich.

Lazarus went to heaven, not because he was good, but because he was poor.
Christ cared nothing for painting, for sculpture, for music – nothing for any art. He said nothing about the duties of nation to nation, of king to subject; nothing about the rights of man; nothing about intellectual liberty or the freedom of speech. He said nothing about the sacredness of home; not one word for the fireside; not a word in favor of marriage, in honor of matern ~ Robert G. Ingersoll

As a fat body is more subject to diseases, so are rich men to absurdities and fooleries, to many casualties and cross inconveniences. ~ Robert Burton

With a perversity of judgement, which must be attributed to his not having by Nature a very strong head, the Graces, the Spirit, the Sagacity, and the Perseverance, of the Villain of the Story outweighed all his absurdities and all his Atrocities with Sir Edward. With him, such Conduct was Genius, Fire and Feeling. It interested and inflamed him; and he was always more anxious for its Success and mourned over its Discomfitures with more Tenderness than could ever have been contemplated by the Authors. ~ Jane Austen

Write it on your heart
that every day is the best day in the year.
He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day
who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.
Finish every day and be done with it.
You have done what you could.
Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in.
Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day;
begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit
to be cumbered with your old nonsense.
This new day is too dear,
with its hopes and invitations,
to waste a moment on the yesterdays. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Physics advances by accepting absurdities. Its history is one of unbelievable ideas proving to be true. ~ Rivka Galchen

All cultures have things to learn from all other cultures. Don't get stuck in your culture! Go beyond it! Get out of your aquarium; get out of your farm; get out of your castle; break your bell jar! Give chance to other cultures and to other opinions! This is the best way for you to see the insufficiencies, absurdities and stupidities in your culture! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Modern man is determined to believe; that he has demonstrated by the very strength with which he has clutched at absurdities, at fleeting phantasms of the mind. ·Yet he is a rational being who must be brought to salvation in a rational manner. If it is to be equal to the task, theology must no longer be a second class subject in the curriculum. Rather must theology as the prince of sciences attract not only the beSt heans, but the best minds too, the purest intellects-those which find no satisfaction in the discipline of the individual sciences nor even in philosophy, but which are commensurate with the totality of things, with. the universe. ~ Ernst Junger

Of all the systems - if indeed a bundle of contradictions and absurdities may be called a system - which human nature in its moments of intoxication has produced, that which men have contrived with a view to forming the minds and regulating the conduct of women, is perhaps the most completely absurd. ~ Mary Hays

It is evident that most of what we think of as our medieval ancestors' barbaric practices were based on mistaken beliefs about how the laws of nature actually operate. If you - and everyone around you, including ecclesiastical and political authorities - truly believe that witches cause disease, crop failures, sickness, catastrophes, and accidents, then it is not only a rational act to burn witches, it is also a moral duty. This is what Voltaire meant when he wrote that people who believe absurdities are more likely to commit atrocities. ~ Michael Shermer

Production for the sake of production - the obsession with the rate of growth, whether in the capitalist market or in planned economies - leads to monstrous absurdities. The only acceptable finality of human activity is the production of a subjectivity that is auto-enriching its relation to the world in a continuous fashion. ~ Felix Guattari

There spoke the race!" he said; "always ready to claim what it hasn't got, and mistake its ounce of brass filings for a ton of gold-dust. You have a mongrel perception of humor, nothing more; a multitude of you possess that. This multitude see the comic side of a thousand low-grade and trivial things--broad incongruities, mainly; grotesqueries, absurdities, evokers of the horse-laugh. The ten thousand high-grade comicalities which exist in the world are sealed from their dull vision. Will a day come when the race will detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them--and by laughing at them destroy them? For your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon--laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution-- these can lift at a colossal humbug--push it a little--weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand. You are always fussing and fighting with your other weapons. Do you ever use that one? No; you leave it lying rusting. As a race, do you ever use it at all? No; you lack sense and the courage. ~ Mark Twain

Humor is very interesting to me. My films are not comedies, but there's comedy in them from time to time, absurdities, just like in real life. ~ David Lynch

Those who can be made to believe absurdities can be made to commit atrocities. ~ Voltaire

Mankind is focused on earth; he is mostly interested in stupid things like wars or ideological absurdities. What he has to do is to concentrate on the universe, because the universe is a cosmic novel that he must read fully, that he must understand fully and that in the end he must rewrite it! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

A sense of humor is a sense of proportion. It is also a sense of delight
delight in noting life has its incongruities and absurdities and that we can live in spite of them.
John Frederick Nims (WESTERN WIND: AN INTRODUCTION TO POETRY) ~ Margaret Jean Langstaff

Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life's absurdities by thinking absurdly about them. ~ Lewis Mumford

Life is full of strange absurdities, which, strangely enough, do not even need to appear plausible, since they are true. ~ Luigi Pirandello

When absurdities get repeated often enough, they start sounding like truth. ~ T. Colin Campbell

[Opera] does not call so much for an imaginative ear as for an imaginative eye, an eye which can see beyond little absurdities toward great truths. ~ George Richard Marek

Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries. Truth is uniform and narrow; it constantly exists, and does not seem to require so much an active energy, as a passive aptitude of the soul in order to encounter it. But error is endlessly diversified; it has no reality, but is the pure and simple creation of the mind that invents it. In this field the soul has room enough to expand herself, to display all her boundless faculties, and all her beautiful and interesting extravagancies and absurdities. ~ Benjamin Franklin

Sometimes everyone needed to be around that friend who loved you no matter what, despite your colossal, irreversible character flaws. Not family, he thought, because they have to love you, but a friend dealing with the absurdities of life just like him, and who has chosen him to share them with. ~ Layton Green

Being in darkness and confusion is interesting to me. But behind it you can rise out of that and see things the way the really are. That there is some sort of truth to the whole thing, if you could just get to that point where you could see it, and live it, and feel it ... I think it is a long, long, way off. In the meantime there's suffering and darkness and confusion and absurdities, and it's people kind of going in circles. It's fantastic. It's like a strange carnival: it's a lot of fun, but it's a lot of pain. ~ David Lynch

The emancipation of today displays itself mainly in cigarettes and shorts ... painted lips and nails, and the return of trailing skirts and other absurdities of dress which betoken the slave-woman's intelligent companionship. ~ Sylvia Pankhurst

As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities. ~ Voltaire

The very fact of being human panics us into the most grotesque play-acting imaginable; and we deal in absurdities to keep life from being a total waste, like one constant jacking-off party. ~ Hal Bennett

If Jesus Christ was the being which those mythologists tell us he was, and that he came into this world to suffer, which is a word they sometimes use instead of 'to die,' the only real suffering he could have endured would have been 'to live.' His existence here was a state of exilement or transportation from heaven, and the way back to his original country was to die. - In fine, everything in this strange system is the reverse of what it pretends to be. It is the reverse of truth, and I become so tired of examining into its inconsistencies and absurdities, that I hasten to the conclusion of it, in order to proceed to something better. ~ Thomas Paine

What an air of probability sometimes runs through a dream! And at others, what a heap of absurdities it is! ~ Jane Austen

It's just the way things are. Take a moment to consider this statement. Really think about it. We send one species to the butcher and give our love and kindness to another apparently for no reason other than because it's the way things are. When our attitudes and behaviors towards animals are so inconsistent, and this inconsistency is so unexamined, we can safely say we have been fed absurdities. It is absurd that we eat pigs and love dogs and don't even know why. Many of us spend long minutes in the aisle of the drugstore mulling over what toothpaste to buy. Yet most of don't spend any time at all thinking about what species of animal we eat and why. Our choices as consumers drive an industry that kills ten billion animals per year in the United States alone. If we choose to support this industry and the best reason we can come up with is because it's the way things are, clearly something is amiss. What could cause an entire society of people to check their thinking caps at the door--and to not even realize they're doing so? Though this question is quite complex, the answer is quite simple: carnism. ~ Melanie Joy

We can all do our share to redeem the world in spite of all absurdities and all frustrations and all disappointments. ~ Abraham Joshua Heschel

to conceive of the Infinite quantitatively is not only to limit it, but in addition it
is to conceive of it as subject to increase and decrease, which is no less absurd; with similar considerations one quickly finds oneself envisaging not only several infinites that coexist without confounding or excluding one another, but also infinites that are larger or smaller than others; and finally, the infinite having become so relative under these conditions that it no longer suffices, the 'transfinite' is invented, that is, the domain of quantities greater than the infinite. Here, indeed, it is properly a matter of 'invention, for such conceptions correspond to no reality. So many words, so many absurdities, even regarding simple, elementary logic, yet this does not prevent one from finding among those responsible some who even claim to be 'specialists' in logic, so great is the intellectual confusion of our times! ~ Rene Guenon

I have now gone through the examination of the four books ascribed to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John; and when it is considered that the whole space of time, from the crucifixion to what is called the ascension, is but a few days, apparently not more than three or four, and that all the circumstances are reported to have happened nearly about the same spot, Jerusalem, it is, I believe, impossible to find in any story upon record so many and such glaring absurdities, contradictions, and falsehoods, as are in those books. They are more numerous and striking than I had any expectation of finding, when I began this examination, and far more so than I had any idea of when I wrote the former part of 'The Age of Reason. ~ Thomas Paine

For God's sake, take the religion out of your life or all kind of absurdities will take the reason out of your life! Keep God, get rid of religion! God, Love and Science; the Magnificent Trinity! All you need is these three things! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

He(Samuel, known as 'the Pea') was as apprehensive, weak and nervous about things as Swaminathan was. The bond between them was laughter. They were able to see together the same absurdities and incongruities in things. The most trivial and unnoticeable thing to others would tickle them to death. ~ R.K. Narayan

I don't mean to romanticise the struggle, that leads to all kinds of terrible violence and absurdities that are even worse than the perverse immediate gratification. ~ John Maus

There seems to be no limit to the lies that honest but stupid disciples will tell for the glory of their master and for what they regard as the success of their propaganda. Men who would scorn to tell a lie in everyday life will become unscrupulous cheats and liars when they have given themselves up to propagandist work; it is one of the perplexing absurdities of our human nature. ~ H.G.Wells

Economic absurdities are produced only when power is at stake. ~ Ernst Junger

Take away from Genesis the belief that Moses was the author, on which only the strange believe that it is the word of God has stood, and there remains nothing of Genesis but an anonymous book of stories, fables, and traditionary or invented absurdities, or of downright lies. ~ Thomas Paine

The work of the poet has always been to shine a bright light on the absurdities of society, challenging hypocrisy and greed, and presenting the tools of change. (Donovan) ~ Yoko Ono

Actually I'm reminded of a time when I smuggled myself into Sydney Opera House to see Faust. Sydney Opera House is very beautiful at night, its grand interiors and lights beaming out over the water and into the night sky. Afterwards I came out and I heard three women talking together, leaning on the railing overlooking the darkened bay. The older woman was describing how she was having problems with her job, which turned out to be working for the CIA as an intelligence agent, and she had previously complained to the Senate Select Committee for Intelligence and so on, and she was telling this in hushed tones to her niece and another woman. I thought, "So it is true then. CIA agents really do hang out at the Sydney opera!" And then I looked inside the Opera House through the massive glass panels at the front, and there in all this lonely palatial refinement was a water rat that had crawled up in to the Opera House interior, and was scurrying back and forth, leaping on to the fine linen-covered tables and eating the Opera House food, jumping on to the counter with all the tickets and having a really great time. And actually I think that is the most probable scenario for the future: an extremely confining, homogenized, postmodern transnational totalitarian structure with incredible complexity, absurdities and debasements, and within that incredible complexity a space where only the smart rats can go. ~ Julian Assange

When a man has once brought himself to accept uncritically all the absurdities that religious doctrines put before him and even to overlook the contradictions between them, we need not be greatly surprised at the weakness of his intellect. ~ Sigmund Freud

Hell is reimagined by each generation. Its terrain is surveyed for absurdities and remade in a fresher mold; its terrors are scrutinized and, if necessary, reinvented to suit the current climate of atrocity; its architecture is redesigned to appall the eye of the modern damned. ~ Clive Barker

The Bible contains some of the most sublime passages in English literature, but is also full of contradictions, inconsistencies, and absurdities. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Everyone has his own truths and every such truth corresponds to a particular intelligence or consciousness level. If some religious absurdities are your truths, then you must increase your level to approach to the real truth! At the position of low level intelligence and consciousness, it is impossible to see the real truth! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

An individualist town councillor will walk along the municipal pavement, lit by municipal gas and cleansed by municipal brooms with municipal water and - seeing by the municipal clock in the municipal market, that he is too early to meet his children coming from the municipal school, hard by the country lunatic asylum and the municipal hospital, will use the national telegraph system to tell them not to walk through the municipal park, but to come by the municipal tramway to meet him in the municipal reading-room, by the municipal museum, art-gallery, and library, where he intends ... to prepare his next speech in the municipal town hall in favor of the nationalization of canals and in increase of Government control of the railway system. "Socialism, Sir," he will say, "don't waste the time of a practical man by your fantastic absurdities. Self-help, Sir, individual self-help, that's what has made our city what it is. ~ Sidney Webb

I was always fascinated by the absurdities and luxuries and the snobbism of the world that fashion magazines showed. Of course, it's not for everyone ... But I lived in that world, not only during my years in the magazines business but for years before, because I was always of that world
at least in my imagination. ~ Diana Vreeland

Let me tell you, novice, that the absurd is only too necessary on earth. The world stands on absurdities, and perhaps nothing would have come to pass in it without them. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Certainly in each social period, youth must be made to venerate the dominant absurdities. ~ Charles Fourier

I found the book, Qur'an,] in spite of "the contradictions, the absurdities, the anachronisms", "rhapsody, without connection, without order, and without art. ~ Voltaire

Sensible Catholics have for generations been ignoring the views on contraception held by reactionary old men in the Vatican, but alas, since it is the business of all religious doctrines to keep their votaries in a state of intellectual infancy (how else do they keep absurdities seeming credible?), insufficient numbers of Catholics have been able to be sensible. ~ A.C. Grayling

If we don't know our own history, then we simply will have to endure all of the same mistakes, all of the same sacrifices, all of the same absurdities over again - times ten. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Only absurdities need to be defended. Truth speaks for itself. ~ Stefan Emunds

The only safe rule, therefore, is that which Aristotle mentions in the last chapter of his Topica: not to dispute with the first person you meet, but only with those of your acquaintance of whom you know that they possess sufficient intelligence and self-respect not to advance absurdities; to appeal to reason and not to authority, and to listen to reason and yield to it; and, finally, to cherish truth, to be willing to accept reason even from an opponent, and to be just enough to bear being proved to be in the wrong, should truth lie with him. From this it follows that scarcely one man in a hundred is worth your disputing with him. You may let the remainder say what they please, for every one is at liberty to be a fool - desipere est jus gentium. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Rogueries, absurdities and untruths were perpetrated upon the teachings of Jesus by a large band of dupes and importers led by Paul, the first great corrupter of the teaching of Jesus. ~ Thomas Jefferson

What is the benefit of fasting in our body while filling our souls with innumerable evils? He who does not play at dice, but spends his leisure otherwise, what nonsense does he not utter? What absurdities does he not listen to? Leisure without the fear of God is, for those who do not know how to use time, the teacher of wickedness. ~ Saint Basil

I hate wars and revoloutions and these dramas of redemptive violence that turn upon themselves like endlessly long screws and haul entire generations through the same murderous absurdities, apparently without ERROR signals going off in anybody's head. ~ Yasmina Khadra

Absurdities are great or small in proportion to custom or insuetude. ~ Walter Savage Landor

The most pernicious of absurdities is that weak, blind, stupid faith is better than the constant practice of every human virtue. ~ Walter Savage Landor

Christianity is an old metaphysical fiction, stuffed with fables, contradictions and absurdities: it was spawned in the fevered imagination of the Orientals, and then spread to our Europe, where some fanatics espoused it, where some intriguers pretended to be convinced by it and where some imbeciles actually believed it. ~ Frederick The Great

There is no method of reasoning more common, and yet none more blameable, than, in philosophical disputes, to endeavour the refutation of any hypothesis, by a pretence of its dangerous consequences to religion and morality. When any opinion leads to absurdities, it is certainly false; but it is not certain that an opinion is false, because it is of danger-ous consequence. Such topics, therefore, ought entirely to be forborne; as serving nothing to the discovery of truth, but only to make the person
of an antagonist odious. ~ David Hume

But whatever you do, take neither yourselves nor your fellow-creatures too seriously. There is tragedy enough in our daily routine, but there is room too for a keen sense of the absurdities and incongruities of life, and in the shifting panorama no one sees better than the doctor the perennial sameness of men's ways. ~ William Osler

Macaulay, teaches us in a passage that the politicians of all Latin countries ought to learn by heart. After having shown all the good that can be accomplished by laws which appear from the point of view of pure reason a chaos of absurdities and contradictions, he compares the scores of constitutions that have been engulphed in the convulsions of the Latin peoples with that of England, and points out that the latter has only been very slowly changed part by part, under the influence of immediate necessities and never of speculative reasoning ~ Gustave Le Bon

I now understand that I would never have been able to become a plausible critic of the absurdities of modern consciousness until I myself had experienced them. I did not become an orthodox believer or theologian until after I tried out most of the errors long rejected by Christianity. If my first forty years were spent hungering for meaning in life, the last forty have been spent in being fed. If the first forty were prodigal, the last forty have been a homecoming. ~ Thomas C. Oden

Smile at a friend, at a stranger, at an enemy, at life's absurdities and the universe will smile back at you. ~ Carol Vorvain

Criticism is now become mere hangman's work, and meddles only with the faults of authors ; nay, the critic is disgusted less with their absurdities than excellence ; and you cannot displease him more than in leaving him little room for his malice. ~ John Dryden

I want the Brahmins to realize that the Dravidian people today are very much hating those who cunningly cheated them with absurdities. They are now aware of the particular community making a living by spreading the foolishness. People have begun to hate god, religion, caste, mythologies (puranas) and so on. ~ Periyar E.V. Ramasamy

When men are most sure and arrogant they are commonly most mistaken, giving views to passion without that proper deliberation which alone can secure them from the grossest absurdities. ~ David Hume

Are there any Nazis left that I could hunt down and bring to justice?" Augustus asked while we leaned over the vitrines reading Otto's letters and the gutting replies that no, no one had seen his children after the liberation.

"I think they're all dead. But it's not like the Nazis had a monopoly on evil."

"True," he said. "That's what we should do, Hazel Grace: We should team up and be this disabled vigilante duo roaring through the world, righting wrongs, defending the weak, protecting the endangered."

Although it was his dream and not mine, I indulged it. He'd indulged mine, after all. "Our fearlessness shall be our secret weapon," I said.

"The tales of our exploits will survive as long as the human voice itself," he said.

"And even after that, when the robots recall the human absurdities of sacrifice and compassion, they will remember us."

"They will robot-laugh at our courageous folly," he said. "But something in their iron robot hearts will yearn to have lived and died as we did: on the hero's errand. ~ John Green

Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices. ~ Voltaire

The hocus-pocus phantasm of a God like another Cerberus, with one body and three heads, had its birth and growth in the blood of thousands and thousands of martyrs ... In fact, the Athanasian paradox that one is three, and three but one, is so incomprehensible to the human mind, that no candid man can say he has any idea of it, and how can he believe what presents no idea? He who thinks he does, only deceives himself. He proves, also, that man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without a rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such persons, gullibility which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck.
[Letter to James Smith discussing Jefferson's hate of the doctrine of the Christian trinity, December 8 1822] ~ Thomas Jefferson

Growing up in a cathedral precinct, what did I know of the absurdities of communism, of how brave man and women in bleak and remote penal colonies were reduced to thinking day by day of nothing else beyond their own survival? ~ Ian McEwan

Mine is a so-called vintage existence, anachronistic living, made all the more rewarding by keeping a raised eyebrow on the absurdities of modern life. ~ Fennel Hudson

Now I must listen again to Claude's set piece on menu terms, as if he's the first ever to spot these unimportant absurdities. He lingers on "pan-fried." What is pan but a deceitful benediction on the vulgar and unhealthy fried? ~ Ian McEwan

Those who believe absurdities will commit atrocities. ~ Voltaire

Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities. ~ Voltaire