Irony Quotes

The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive.
Robert A. Heinlein

Life, Alive, Anyone

A taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking than a sense of humor, for it takes irony to appreciate the joke which is on oneself.
Jessamyn West

Humor, Sense, Joke

Brain research tells us that only twenty percent of human beings have a sense of irony, which means that eighty percent of the world takes everything at face value.
Doug Coupland

Human, Everything, Brain

If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom, and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.
W. Somerset Maugham

Money, Freedom, Lose

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed.
Frederick Douglass

Time, Needed, Argument

Without a trace of irony I can say I have been blessed with brilliant enemies. I owe them a great debt, because they redoubled my energies and drove me in new directions.
E. O. Wilson

Great, Blessed, Debt

Neither irony or sarcasm is argument.
Samuel Butler

Neither, Argument, Sarcasm

Humor brings insight and tolerance. Irony brings a deeper and less friendly understanding.
Agnes Repplier

Humor, Friendly, Tolerance

Irony is the gaiety of reflection and the joy of wisdom.
Anatole France

Wisdom, Joy, Reflection

Irony regards every simple truth as a challenge.
Mason Cooley

Truth, Simple, Challenge

Certainly, it seems true enough that there's a good deal of irony in the world... I mean, if you live in a world full of politicians and advertising, there's obviously a lot of deception.
Kenneth Koch

Good, Live, True

Irony is a clear consciousness of an eternal agility, of the infinitely abundant chaos.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Chaos, Clear, Eternal

Clap an extinguisher upon your irony if you are unhappily blessed with a vein of it.
Charles Lamb

Blessed, Clap, Unhappily

Pictures artists staged their own images or copied or cut out others already in existence. The viewer took them in separately, in sometimes paradoxical waves: an original image, then the manipulations of it, then the places where image and idea intersected. This created a crucial perceptual glitch that irony and understanding filled.
Jerry Saltz

Others, Sometimes, Idea

To me the biggest irony of this lifetime that I'm living is that for someone who thrives in the public eye in the creative ways that I do, I actually don't enjoy being in the public eye.
Alanis Morissette

Someone, Enjoy, Living

Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is what is good and great at the same time.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Time, Good, Great

I love the irony. I'm perceived as being really young and yet I have the clinical condition of an old man.
Michael J. Fox

Love, Young, Old

Humor is everywhere, in that there's irony in just about anything a human does.
Bill Nye

Humor, Human, Everywhere

Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.
Charles Baudelaire

Two, Qualities, Literary

Irony is just honesty with the volume cranked up.
George Saunders

Honesty, Volume

The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates.
David Foster Wallace

Great, Above, Flaws

People use irony as a defense mechanism.
David Byrne

Defense, Mechanism

I always thought the biggest failing of Americans was their lack of irony. They are very serious there! Naturally, there are exceptions... the Jewish, Italian, and Irish humor of the East Coast.
Colin Firth

Humor, Thought, Serious

The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, 'then' what do we do?
David Foster Wallace

Art, Problem, Once

What people adore about superhero movies is the signal quality of the Christopher Nolan films - their complete lack of irony when it comes to the portrayal of heroism and the need for heroes to confront evil.
John Podhoretz

Movies, Evil, Quality

The accident was a horrible thing - but that horrible thing made Chris, at the end of his life, Superman. It's a happy irony if there is such a thing. I'm proud to have known him.
Morgan Freeman

Life, Happy, End

My father could be very witty, even if the humor was always on the darker side of irony.
Maurice Sendak

Humor, Father, Side

As you watch the world crumble, try taking your Armageddon with this sprinkling of irony: Over the last three decades, business has got virtually everything it wanted, and its doomsday scenario from the 1970s has come true because of it.
Thomas Frank

Business, True, Everything

The kind of funny irony is that a lot of people talk about ethical meat eating as if it's a way to care about things, but also not to alienate yourself from the rest of the world. But it's so much more alienating than vegetarianism.
Jonathan Safran Foer

Funny, Yourself, Care

The unhappy irony is that, while 'Glee' is hitting the heights, school arts funding is being slashed across the country due to the steep recession and declining tax revenues.
James Wolcott

School, Country, While

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