All people are paradoxical. No one is easily reducible, so I like characters who have contradictory impulses or shades of ambiguity. It's fun, and it's fun because it's hard.
Edward Norton

And hence he must be invisible; for a spirit cannot be seen by the eye of man: nor is there any thing in this principle contradictory to reason or experience.
Adam Clarke

As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.
Charles Baudelaire

Contradictory to my religion, I think, is journalism.
Sydney Schanberg

Disney made a fortune out of inventing the businessman's idea of the imaginary as the contradictory of the businessman's idea of the real.
David Antin

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
George Orwell

Each building has to be beautiful, but cheap and fast, but it lasts forever. That is already an incredible battery of seemingly contradictory demands. So yes, I'm definitely perhaps contradictory person, but I operate in very contradictory times.
Rem Koolhaas

Emotion is messy, contradictory... and true.
Nigella Lawson

Every novelist has a different purpose - and often several purposes which might even be contradictory.
Irwin Shaw

I am a contradictory mess but I see it as my prerogative to change my mood like the weather.
Shirley Manson

It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically considered, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as society and the individual are mutually exclusive.
Thomas Mann

It is not possible to live in this age if you don't have a sense of many contradictory forces.
Rem Koolhaas

It's about how to bring together the seemingly contradictory aspects of the memorial, which is about a tragedy and how it changed the world, but also about creating a vital and beautiful city of the 21st century.
Daniel Libeskind

It's quite hard for people to just accept that they're very contradictory.
Kenneth Branagh

Many intelligence reports in war are contradictory; even more are false, and most are uncertain.
Karl Von Clausewitz

My mind withdrew its thoughts from experience, extracting itself from the contradictory throng of sensuous images, that it might find out what that light was wherein it was bathed... And thus, with the flash of one hurried glance, it attained to the vision of That Which Is.
Saint Augustine

One might as well try to ride two horses moving in different directions, as to try to maintain in equal force two opposing or contradictory sets of desires.
Robert Collier

Some people suggest that the problem is the separation of powers. If you had a parliamentary system, the struggle for power would not result in such complex peace treaties that empower so many different people to pursue so many contradictory aims.
James Q. Wilson

The 'morality of compromise' sounds contradictory. Compromise is usually a sign of weakness, or an admission of defeat. Strong men don't compromise, it is said, and principles should never be compromised.
Andrew Carnegie

There's nothing more ironic or contradictory than life itself.
Robert De Niro