Contradictions Quotes

“why can't we love the right people? what is so wrong with us that we rush into situations to which we are manifestly unsuited, which will hurt us and others? why are we given emotions which we cannot control and which move in exact contradiction to what we really want? we are walking conflicts, internal battles on legs.”
― Marian Keyes, The Other Side of the Story

“If

"If freckles were lovely, and day was night,
And measles were nice and a lie warn't a lie,
Life would be delight,--
But things couldn't go right
For in such a sad plight
I wouldn't be I.

If earth was heaven and now was hence,
And past was present, and false was true,
There might be some sense
But I'd be in suspense
For on such a pretense
You wouldn't be you.

If fear was plucky, and globes were square,
And dirt was cleanly and tears were glee
Things would seem fair,--
Yet they'd all despair,
For if here was there
We wouldn't be we.”
― E.E. Cummings

“...it is not to be understood that I am with him [Jesus] in all his doctrines. I am a Materialist, he takes the side of spiritualism; he preaches the efficacy of repentance toward forgiveness of sin. I require a counterpoise of good works to redeem it... Among the sayings & discourses imputed to him by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence: and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being.

[Letter to William Short, 13 April 1820]”
― Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson

“People are... Full of contradictions. They're lonely. And then they're not. They're missed. And then they're not.”
― Kou Yoneda, 漂えど沈まず、されど泣きもせず [Tadayoedo Shizumazu Saredo Naki Mo Sezu]

“Indonesia ini memang negeri yang unik, penuh dengan hal-hal yang seram serius, tetapi penuh dagelan dan badutan juga. Mengerikan tapi lucu, dilarang justru dicari dan amat laku, dianjurkan, disuruh tetapi malah diboikot, kalah tetapi justru menjadi amat populer dan menjadi pahlawan khalayak ramai, berjaya tetapi keok celaka, fanatik anti PKI tetapi berbuat persis PKI, terpeleset tetapi dicemburui, aman tertib tetapi kacau balau, ngawur tetapi justru disenangi, sungguh misterius tetapi gamblang bagi semua orang. Membuat orang yang sudah banyak makan garam seperti saya ini geleng-geleng kepala tetapi sekaligus kalbu hati cekikikan. Entahlah, saya tidak tahu. Gelap memprihatinkan tetapi mengandung harapan fajar menyingsing......(menyanyi) itulah Indonesia. Menulis kolooom selesai.
["Fenomena PRD dll,"].”
― Y.B. Mangunwijaya, Politik hati nurani

“Drugs don't really fix anything, except for everything.”
― Ashly Lorenzana

“Being able to embrace contradictions is a sign of intelligence.
Or insanity.”
― Richard Kadrey, Butcher Bird

“‎These little contradictions are in all of us. They're in me at least. And so I forgot that I had been awake for 30 hours and kept walking, grateful to be a little boat full of water, still floating.”
― John Green

“I've always been drawn to tormented people full of contradictions.”
― Antonio Tabucchi

“You claim that the evidentiary miracle is present and available, namely, the Koran. You say: 'Whoever denies it, let him produce a similar one.' Indeed, we shall produce a thousand similar, from the works of rhetoricians, eloquent speakers and valiant poets, which are more appropriately phrased and state the issues more succinctly. They convey the meaning better and their rhymed prose is in better meter. … By God what you say astonishes us! You are talking about a work which recounts ancient myths, and which at the same time is full of contradictions and does not contain any useful information or explanation. Then you say: 'Produce something like it'‽”
― Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi

“Each religion makes scores of purportedly factual assertions about everything from the creation of the universe to the afterlife. But on what grounds can believers presume to know that these assertions are true? The reasons they give are various, but the ultimate justification for most religious people’s beliefs is a simple one: we believe what we believe because our holy scriptures say so. But how, then, do we know that our holy scriptures are factually accurate? Because the scriptures themselves say so. Theologians specialize in weaving elaborate webs of verbiage to avoid saying anything quite so bluntly, but this gem of circular reasoning really is the epistemological bottom line on which all 'faith' is grounded. In the words of Pope John Paul II: 'By the authority of his absolute transcendence, God who makes himself known is also the source of the credibility of what he reveals.' It goes without saying that this begs the question of whether the texts at issue really were authored or inspired by God, and on what grounds one knows this. 'Faith' is not in fact a rejection of reason, but simply a lazy acceptance of bad reasons. 'Faith' is the pseudo-justification that some people trot out when they want to make claims without the necessary evidence.

But of course we never apply these lax standards of evidence to the claims made in the other fellow’s holy scriptures: when it comes to religions other than one’s own, religious people are as rational as everyone else. Only our own religion, whatever it may be, seems to merit some special dispensation from the general standards of evidence.

And here, it seems to me, is the crux of the conflict between religion and science. Not the religious rejection of specific scientific theories (be it heliocentrism in the 17th century or evolutionary biology today); over time most religions do find some way to make peace with well-established science. Rather, the scientific worldview and the religious worldview come into conflict over a far more fundamental question: namely, what constitutes evidence.

Science relies on publicly reproducible sense experience (that is, experiments and observations) combined with rational reflection on those empirical observations. Religious people acknowledge the validity of that method, but then claim to be in the possession of additional methods for obtaining reliable knowledge of factual matters — methods that go beyond the mere assessment of empirical evidence — such as intuition, revelation, or the reliance on sacred texts. But the trouble is this: What good reason do we have to believe that such methods work, in the sense of steering us systematically (even if not invariably) towards true beliefs rather than towards false ones? At least in the domains where we have been able to test these methods — astronomy, geology and history, for instance — they have not proven terribly reliable. Why should we expect them to work any better when we apply them to problems that are even more difficult, such as the fundamental nature of the universe?

Last but not least, these non-empirical methods suffer from an insuperable logical problem: What should we do when different people’s intuitions or revelations conflict? How can we know which of the many purportedly sacred texts — whose assertions frequently contradict one another — are in fact sacred?”
― Alan Sokal

“Your emotional capacity is an empty motor, and your values are the fuel with which your mind fills it. If you choose a mix of contradictions, it will clog your motor, corrode your transmission and wreck you on your first attempt to move with a machine which you, the driver, have corrupted.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“The dream has a very striking way of dealing with the category of opposites and contradictions. This is simply disregarded. To the dream 'No' does not seem to exist. In particular, it prefers to draw opposites together into a unity or to represent them as one. Indeed, it also takes the liberty of representing some random element by its wished-for opposite, so that at first one cannot tell which of the possible poles is meant positively or negatively in the dream-thoughts.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams

“Now there are some, and I don't just mean Communists like you, but thinking men of all political parties, who think that not many of these gods actually exist. Some believe that none of them exist. There's just us and an ocean of darkness around us. I'm no philosopher or poet, how would I know the truth? It's true that all these gods seem to do awfully little work - much like our politicians - and yet keep winning reelection to their golden thrones in heaven, year after year. That's not to say I don't respect them, Mr. Premier! Don't you ever let that blasphemous idea into your yellow skull. My country is the kind where it pays to play it both ways: the Indian entrepreneur has to be straight and crooked, mocking and believing, sly and sincere, at the same time.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“Man has 2 common problems with God: the one is that there is evil in the world; the other is that free will is limited. The one, he is charging that the world is too evil; the other is that it is not evil enough.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“The Tausennigan Ob'enn warlords look like cuddly teddy-bears?"

"Yes, they do, and they'd cheerfully exterminate your entire race for making that observation!"

"I guess that explains their rich military history, then.”
― Howard Tayler, The Tub of Happiness

“I will raise up prophets to make conflicting pronouncements that inevitably will be garbled in transcription, resulting in mutually exclusive definitions of orthodoxy from which the open-minded will flee in dismay.”
― Sheri S. Tepper, The Visitor

“We are nothing but lies, duplicity, contradiction, and we hide and disguise ourselves from ourselves.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“We are pacifists, but we have tanks on our sweaters. (The times we live in.)”
― Isabel Waidner, We Are Made Of Diamond Stuff

“The part of life
devoted to contemplation
was at odds with the part
committed to action.”
― Louise Glück, Winter Recipes from the Collective

“The problem with solutionism... It assumes that rationality has the tools to solve every problem. ... We think problems are decidable because we only see the decidable ones. We don't see the infinite number of problems we can't solve because it's so difficult even to describe them. We are finite creations and can solve problems only if we can develop algorithms --finite procedures-- for reaching the correct answers. Most problems do not have solutions that are reducible to finite procedures. To assume the world is built so we can figure it out is absurd.”
― Scott J. Shapiro, Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks

“As for the job itself, a lifelong crook doing part-time security work wasn't so strange. Half the cops in New York were thieving bitches first and cops second. City like this, it behooves you to embrace the fucking contradictions.”
― Colson Whitehead, Crook Manifesto

“Art, at its best, is a kind of uncontrolled yet disciplined Yelp, made by one of us who, because of the brain he was born with and the experiences he has had and the training he has received, is able to emit a Yelp that contains all of the joys, miseries, and contradictions of life as it is actually lived.”
― George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone

“In orthodoxy, we see the coming together of seemingly contrary opposites, not in some sort of amalgamation or compromise, but simply affirming both in their fiery fullness. Our vision must be big enough to see truth from multiple angles, to see how truths connect and uphold each other.”
― Trevin Wax, The Thrill of Orthodoxy: Rediscovering the Adventure of Christian Faith

“We don't become white even if we wash ourselves with a kilo of soap. We are not angels who do not know the word sin, but we are also not devils whose work is nothing but misleading. In humans there are always paradoxes, contradictions and inconsistencies, but that doesn't mean our existence has no meaning. Black and white humans cannot be seen solely from their skin color, degree level, gender differences or other dichotomous things based on social stratification in society. In fact, life is not always what it seems. Life is not a story in fiction or superhero stories. We don't pull everything into the corner where we want to stand. Seeing things from a perspective with binary opposition; honesty versus hypocrisy, egoism versus altruism, good versus evil, batman versus joker...”
― Titon Rahmawan

“Dr. Forster: You are a puzzle.

Adolf Hitler: I certainly hope so.”
― Josh Becker, Hitler in the Madhouse

“Now, there are two different attitudes towards learning from others. One is the dogmatic attitude of transplanting everything, whether or not it is suited to our conditions. This is no good. The other attitude is to use our heads and learn those things that suit our conditions, that is, to absorb whatever experience is useful to us. That is the attitude we should adopt.”
― Mao Zedong, On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People

“It was as if he took the complexity of human beings as a personal affront, the maddening inconsistency of human beings, their contradictions which they made no attempt to wipe out or reconcile, their mixture of idealism and concupiscence, grandeur and pettiness, truth and lies. They were not to be taken seriously any more than a cockroach deserves serious consideration.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“To exist is to deny. What am I today, living today, but the denial of who and what I was yesterday? To exist is to contradict oneself.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“For I am the first and the last. I am the honored one and the scorned one. I am the whore and the holy one. I am the wife and the virgin. I am (the mother) and the daughter. I am the members of my mother... I am the silence that is incomprehensible and the idea whose remembrance is frequent. I am the voice whose sound is manifold and the word whose appearance is multiple. I am the utterance of my name.”
― The Thunder, Perfect Mind