Ironic Quotations | Page 3

In an ironic twist, I now see Good to Great not as a sequel to Built to Last, but more of a prequel. Good to Great is about how to turn a good organization into one that produces sustained great results. Built to Last is about how you take a company with great results and turn it into an enduring great company of iconic stature.

Certainly, anyone whom I've witnessed, who has gone through something horrible and life-changing, has a sense of ironic humor, or an ability to look at the peculiarities of the world and find humor in it.

In our native terms, the ironic style is often compounded with the sardonic and the hard-boiled; even the effortlessly superior. But irony originates in the glance and the shrug of the loser, the outsider, the despised minority. It is a nuance that comes most effortlessly to the oppressed.

With every mistake, we must surely be learning.

Lyrically I'm very ironic and silly, but I hope I'll touch your heart

It was growing late, and though one might stand on the brink of a deep chasm of disaster, one was still obliged to dress for dinner.

I found it to be kind of ironic, because I’m white, therefore I’m appropriating culture, but then Eminem won it - who’s white and won it many times - and they didn’t seem to say anything about that. I suspect it was just because they dislike me.

Ironic people always dissolve when confronted with earnestness, it's their kryptonite

What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.

I am not at all happy with the result. We simply could not convert our chances. It is almost ironic when you consider we had over 60% of the possession in the first half.

How ironic that Sam Johnson has just returned from a visit to Hanoi yet insults the memory for the man who go him out of the there.

It's ironic that retailers and restaurants live or die on customer service, yet their employees have some of the lowest pay and worst benefits of any industry. That's one reason so many retail experiences are mediocre for the public.

I have a great sense of humor, but it has an ironic twist to it.

[As an actor] you're looking to crawl into an anonymous fictional person's skin, but then you have the ironic obligation to promoting the movie in such a public way that it almost undermines the initial intention of going under the radar.

It is ironic that the scientific facts throw Darwin out, but leave William Paley, a figure of fun to the scientific world for more than a century, still in the tournament with a chance of being the ultimate winner... Indeed, such a theory is so obvious that one wonders why it is not widely accepted as being self-evident. The reasons are psychological rather than scientific.

I don't shoot kittens with balls of wool. I don't shoot sunsets. What draws me? Ironic, surreal, unexplained, timely moments.

I'm comfortable looking sexy. I don't push it with poses, although I like the ironic part of it. That's what makes it fun.

As you may have heard, former President Bill Clinton says he's coming here to California to help Governor Gray Davis in his recall election campaign. Which is ironic, isn't it? When Clinton was president, he couldn't recall anything.

I love Derrick Brown for the surprise of one word waking up next to another. One moment tender, funny or romantic, the next, visceral, ironic and relevatory-here is the full chaos of life. An amazing talent.

It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms us to a life that is never really ours.

The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind.

I don't think the nature of my poetry is satirical or even ironic, I think it's essentially lyrical but again I don't know if it's my position to say what my poetry is like.

The most annoying thing I found was all the people pretending to be me on MySpace and Facebook. I'm not a member of either, but apparently there is an 'official' Nikki Sanderson MySpace page, complete with rants about how terrible identity fraud is, which is ironic.

You grow, learn, and the more I can sit in silence and be comfortable with myself, the more I can make noise, as ironic and Zen Buddhist and satanic as it sounds!

The person sending ironic text messages has no idea that their voice does not sound so great in text. There's no dry sense of humor in a text. It comes off as a little bit shitty.

It’s pretty ironic that the so-called ‘least advanced’ people are the ones taking the lead in trying to protect all of us, while the richest and most powerful among us are the ones who are trying to drive the society to destruction.

There's not a lot of room for un-ironic emotion in contemporary culture. I think that irony is an important tool in dealing with the world as we find it. It's a tool of protection, but it can also be a tool of incision to get to some truth. But along the way maybe we've lost some of what I think of as the power of straightforward emotion and earnestness and seriousness.

Own your failure openly, publicly, with genuine regret but absolutely no shame, and you’ll reap a harvest of forgiveness, trust, respect, and connection-the things you thought you’d get by succeeding. Ironic, isn’t it?

Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience.

Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends.

Pulls readers in with an ironic, breezy portrait of sinister high school competitiveness. Deft and extraordinarily accomplished.

How ironic, she thought, as she fell to her certain death, that at that moment she would have given anything to be a giant goose again.

After ages of bombast, the rhetoric of virtue has become ironic and shy.

Ironic and jittery, we are puzzled by the old heroes with their fighting, boasting, and cocksure lovemaking.

Nostalgia keeps dissolving the ironic narratives in which I have contained my past.

One of the most ironic things about capitalism is that the capitalist will sell you the rope to hang himself with. Actually they will give you the money to make a movie that makes them look bad, if they believe they can make money off it.

Ironic that in order to do my life's work, I had to quit my day job.

It seemed ironic that Lowell Levine and I,who were both Jewish, were going over toidentify the remains of a man who was soanti-Semitic.

Isn't it ironic that after 70 years Russia wants God back while we are trying to kick him out?

I'm being ironic. Don't interrupt a man in the midst of being ironic, it's not polite. There!

The reason you might choose to embrace the artist within you now is that this is the path to (cue the ironic music) security.

Ideas that spread win.

It all stems from the same thing - which is that when we are face to face - and this is what I think is so ironic about Facebook being called Facebook, because we are not face to face on Facebook ... when we are face to face, we are inhibited by the presence of the other. We are inhibited from aggression by the presence of another face, another person. We're aware that we're with a human being. On the Internet, we are disinhibited from taking into full account that we are in the presence of another human being.

Irony ruined everything Even the best exploitation movies were never meant to be `so bad they were good`. They were not made for the intelligentsia. They were made to be violent for real, or to be sexy for real. But now everybody has irony. Even horror films now are ironic. Everybody's in on the joke now. Everybody's hip. Nobody takes anything at face value anymore.

Isn't it ironic that today people say, 'If you know the love of God, you don't have to worry when you go on in sin.' But the apostle John said, 'If you know the love of God, you won't be able to go on in sin.'

My first concert isn't that cool or ironic. I wish it had been like, "My first concert was the Backstreet Boys," but the first concert I went to, I think, was this band called The Samples.

It was not a big smile, not particularly bold or polite or ironic or glib, not asking for anything or offering anything, not stringy or careless, not, in short, like any smile I had ever experienced before. But such a smile! You could burn a hole in the world with that smile.

I'm just trying to portray what I find ironic or humorous.

It's ironic, I used to ride my bike to make a living. Now I just want to live so that I can ride.

The ironic thing is that we weren't sure about our starting pitching when we started the season. Now, those guys are all getting aggressive in trying to throw complete games.

The ironic thing is that was the talk before we won the Super Bowl ... that this defense is not what it used to be. We stepped up and showed people they were wrong. The same little mumblings are starting to rumble now, and we're going to step up and show the world again.

The ironic thing about this is that this is the type of student who the 21st Century scholarship is for. She is someone who's really making it as an American citizen.

I guess it's ironic. I just did the Gucci cologne ad, and I was the cologne thief in junior high.

Rock is ironic in that, up to a certain point, you can get better and better at it if you don't mind possibly looking more and more ridiculous.

The films I grew up loving, and the art that I love, is not generally the kind of postmodern ironic winking stuff. What lasts is the stuff in which the artists are totally in league with the subject.

They went inside. The young ones shuffled to a stop as their ironic sensibilities, which served them in lieu of souls, were jammed by a signal of overwhelming power.

The barometer that shows "variable" is an ironic indictment of God.

It's highly ironic that it was the conservatives on the court who overturned so many statutes.

Don’t underestimate the value of irony—it is extremely valuable.

I find it ironic that happy endings now are called fairytale endings because there's nothing happy about most fairytale endings.

Count Hermann Keyserling once said truly that the greatest American superstition was the belief in facts.

A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing.

Did you ever have a conversation with someone who misunderstood everything you had to say? It's exhausting, and the ironic part is that the more you try and explain yourself, the more mixed up things become. Your best friend knows when you're kidding, venting, and tired. He or she knows you and therefore doesn't read into the things you say.

I just love the idea of witches, in general. The whole concept of witches was to keep down the feminine rise in power that was happening, at the time. They created this concept of witches, so that they could burn women at the stake and keep them in their place, and now we've turned it around to empower women. That's very ironic. If they only knew that they created a weapon for us to use against them.

I find it ironic that fear is eliminating the possibility to tell stories that depict our ability to overcome fear

I just really don't like being the center of attention that much. It's kind of ironic.

He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.

It is ironic but true: the one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know. This is why we need art. By expressing our actual experience, the artist reminds us that our science is incomplete, that no map of matter will ever explain the immateriality of our consciousness.

"Politics" per se is absent from my writing but there is usually a moral (if ironic) compass.

I, Anita Blake, scourge of the undead-the human with more vampire kills than any other vampire executioner in the country-was dating a vampire. It was poetically ironic.

Who would have ever thought I'd be afraid of a zombie, any kind of zombie? Nicely ironic that.

Funny thing is, until I met you all I wanted to do was to get as far away from here as I could. Kind of ironic, isn't it? Can't get much farther away than where I"m going, and now I'd give anything to stay.

Irony - The modern mode: either the devil’s mark or the snorkel of sanity.

What 'Scream' was great at was presenting ironic detachment and then making you actually care about the people that were having it, and juxtaposing it with their situation, all in the service of making a great horror movie. It was fresh.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the road less traveled by and they CANCELLED MY FRIKKIN' SHOW. I totally shoulda took the road that had all those people on it. Damn.

People who didn't need people needed people around to know that they were the kind of people who didn't need people.

The ironic life is a life keenly alert, keenly sensitive, reacting promptly with feelings of liking or dislike to each bit of experience, letting none of it pass without interpretation and assimilation, a life full and satisfying - indeed a rival of the religious life.

It's kind of ironic that if I get my Ph.D., I'll be a real doctor

Americans don't understand irony? I am an intelligent person living in the United States. My entire existence is ironic.

I intend 'Dämmerung' to be an ironic meditation on the financial rewards of poetry and a tragicomic lament on the passing of time and the changes in literary taste. The other poets mentioned are my poetic cohort from the U.K. I wrote the piece in situ, as it were, while making a television documentary about World War I in Germany.

At 24 I decided that my life is enough for me, and I stopped looking for some other piece to complete it. I also learned how to needlepoint ironic cross-stitches of rap lyrics and gave them to my friends as presents. I’ll let you decide which is the more important revelation.

I'm the anti indie-rocker. My stuff isn't ironic.

Moral self-infatuation has its own corruptions, after all. With time, almost every other principle of the magazine acquired an ironic echo, a sort of cackling aftermath.

I'm shooting a commercial for safe sex. How ironic. Because I don't have that.

Ironic, isn't it, what religion does to people?" "I guess it's more ironic what people do to religion.

Advice to writers: Sometimes you just have to stop writing. Even before you begin.

Humans also tend to find community to be pleasurable, and within the boundaries of community relationships, words - often ironic and self-deprecating - are always spoken that take on other meanings when uttered by others.

Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism

Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism -- victimless collecting, as it were... in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments.

It's ironic, but until you can free those final monsters within the jungle of yourself, your life, your soul is up for grabs.

It is an old and ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way; and we grasp more fiercely at research, statistics, and technical aids in sex when we have lost the values and meaning of love.

'Neotenty' is 'remaining young,' and it may be ironic that it is so little known, because human evolution has been dominated by it.

I'm actually excited about being in my 40s. I mean, that's ironic considering the show I'm on, but I have never felt like I need to feel or look the same as when I was 20.

Barbarism? That's ironic coming from a woman helping to prepare us for slaughter. And what's she basing our success on? Our table manners?

The passive ironic attitude is not cool or romantic, but pathetic and destructive.

It is ironic that Einsteins most creative work, the general theory of relativity, should boil down to conceptualizing space as a medium when his original premise [in special relativity] was that no such medium existed [..]....

It is ironic that the United States should have been founded by intellectuals, for throughout most of our political history, the intellectual has been for the most part either an outsider, a servant or a scapegoat.

My world on the road always ends up feeling really small which is ironic because that's when I'm seeing the most places and meeting the most people!

It's ironic, but true, that in this age of electronic communications, personal interaction is becoming more important than ever.

It may seem ironic that the judicial branch preserves its legitimacy through refraining from action on political questions. That concept was put forward best by Justice [Felix] Frankfurter, appointed by President [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt.