Contradiction Quotes
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I don't think anyone now really understands the planetisation of mankind, really understands the new world order emerging through all this period of strain and pain and contradiction, so more than ever, we need to have an internal sense of navigation.
William Irwin Thompson -
The strongest and most evil spirits have to date advanced mankind the most: they always rekindled the sleeping passions - all orderly arranged society lulls the passions to sleep; they always reawakened the sense of comparison, of contradiction, of delight in the new, the adventurous, the untried; they compelled men to set opinion against opinion, ideal plan against ideal plan.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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Photography is a medium of formidable contradictions. It is both ridiculously easy and almost impossibly difficult. It is easy because its technical rudiments can readily be mastered by anyonwith a few simple instructions. It is difficult because, while while the artist working in any other medium begins with a blank surface and gradually brings his conception into being, the photographer is the only imagemaker who begins with the picture completed. His emotions, his knowledge, and his native talent are brought into focus and fixed beyond recall the moment the shutter of his camera has closed.
Edward Steichen -
Most People are wretched more by the Fears of what may come, than what they endure at present. ... a manifest Contradiction to good Sense; for who, with the right use of that, wou'd lose the Enjoyment of a present Comfort, to lament a Misfortune only in Supposition; which ten to one never comes to pass.
Eliza Haywood -
Personal liberty without economic liberty is an absolute contradiction; the one cannot exist without the other.
William E. Simon -
There is a deep contradiction in failing to enjoy life and yet fearing death when faced with it.
Kenko Yoshida -
Everybody should have health care, on the one hand. But on the other hand, if you ask Americans, "Are you willing to pay for it?," they say no. So I've never been able to understand this contradiction.
Uwe Reinhardt -
There is yet another kind of matrimonial dialect (which naturally succeeds this of talking at each other), which may very properlybe styled The Language Contradictory.... In the former, however plain the object of satire may be exhibited to the whole company, yet there always remains some little covering.... But in this last method, the defiance becomes more open and the impetuosity with which these contradictions are uttered (although the subjects of them are often of the most indifferent nature) evidently prove that they arise from passion.
Sarah Fielding
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Paleontologists had long been aware of a seeming contradiction between Darwin's postulate of gradualism, confirmed by the work of population genetics, and the actual findings of paleontology. Following phyletic lines through time seemed to reveal only minimal gradual changes but no clear evidence for any change of a species into a different genus or for the gradual origin of an evolutionary novelty. Anything truly novel always seemed to appear quite abruptly in the fossil record.
Ernst Mayr -
I spoke without fear of contradiction. I simply did not suffer self-doubt.
Elia Kazan -
I am a person always full of contradictions... It was hard to choose whether to devote myself to revolution as a soldier or as a writer.
Ba Jin -
We must be physicists in order to be creative since so far codes of values and ideals have been constructed in ignorance of physics or even in contradiction to physics.
Friedrich Nietzsche -
What we agree with leaves us inactive, but contradiction makes us productive.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe -
The dream unites the grossest contradictions, permits impossibilities, sets aside the knowledge that influences us by day, and exposes us as ethically and morally obtuse.
Sigmund Freud
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Life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that can't be solved by analysis.
William Empson -
Smack in the centre of contradiction is the place to be.
Bono U2 -
The fact throughout history is that whenever government dominates the economic affairs of its citizenry, a free society is eroded, then destroyed, and a minority government ensues. Personal liberty without economic liberty is an absolute contradiction; the one cannot exist without the other.
William E. Simon -
We have to acknowledge peace is in danger and mankind still has not realised the priority to be given to world dialogue versus armed contradiction and bloodshed.
Nursultan Nazarbayev -
Do what you will this life's a fiction, And is made up of contradiction.
William Blake -
Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.
Blaise Pascal
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I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.
Georges Bataille -
Big business is basic to the very life of this country; and yet many -perhaps most - Americans have a deep-seated fear and an emotional repugnance to it. Here is monumental contradiction.
David Lilienthal -
The only way you can grow is to let yourself make mistakes and create contradictions. As we learn new things, some of our old attitudes will change.
Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni, Jr. -
Whatever excites the spirit of contradiction is capable of producing the last effects of heroism; which is only the highest pitch of obstinacy, in a good or bad cause, in wisdom or folly.
William Hazlitt