Irony Quotes

I live a very ordinary life. The rare awards ceremonies I go to are quite fun, because I can enjoy the irony of one minute walking to the tube, and the next being driven along the same stretch of road in a limo.

The irony of the political rise of the plutocrats is that, like Venice‘s oligarchs, they threaten the system that created them.

People in the U.K. share my bemusement with the United States that America doesn’t share with itself. They have a sense of irony, which America doesn’t have, seeing as it’s being run by fundamentalists who take things literally.

Listen: our culture is saturated with irony whether we know it or not.

‘Irony’ is such an over-used word.

The irony is that you can’t use real rain to make movies.

Irony is the hygiene of the mind.

I love irony.

I think, in a written novel, the way in which you play with the readers‘ emotion or the way in which you engage the readers’ emotions can be very indirect. You could come at it through irony or comedy, etcetera, and you could capture people‘s sympathies and feelings kind of by stealth if you like.

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

There’s some irony in playing a journalist after some of the stuff that has been written about me, but it’s a great profession, particularly investigative journalism.

As a kid, I didn’t know that ‘All in the Family‘ was satirizing male chauvinism or that Bobby Riggs was a self-promoting put-on. Many of us didn’t get the irony and went on making fun of women and girls who wanted to play sports, especially the same sports that men and boys traditionally played.

The irony is of course that my career has lasted a whole lot longer than some of the people I’ve parodied over the years.

I’m so sick of sarcasm and irony, I could kill! Sincerely, the real root of things is love and sacrifice.

The formerly incarcerated – returning citizens – often face a cruel irony in America. Having paid their debt to society, too many are banned from the ballot box that could help them dismantle policies that essentially extend their sentences.

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.

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.

We think craft is important, and the irony has always been that horror may be disregarded by critics, but often they are the best-made movies you’re going to find in terms of craft. You can’t scare people if they see the seams.

My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it.

My career progressed slowly. Real slow at a time. The irony of it was I had the best part of my career between when I was 45 and 49 years old. That’s when most people are in their twilight, waiting to get to the Champions Tour. And that’s when I made most of my hay.

My partner of 45 years is Australian, and a big part of her character is that marvellous quality of irony which Aussies possess. I relish their humour and sense of fairness.

I’m not sure a lot of us in the music business or in rock ‘n’ roll are given credit for irony or humor.

But the irony is that because the band isn’t the focus any more, it allows me the chance to enjoy being a member of Def Leppard much more.

The irony here is this administration is spending more money on climate change research and development than any administration in all the rest of the industrialized world combined.

In the works of Duchamp, space begins to walk and take on form; it becomes a machine that spins arguments and philosophizes; it resists movement with delay and delay with irony.

I have three sons, as different from each other as any three humans could be but connected by their shared love of Guitar Hero. I’m lucky to be married to a man I can call my soulmate without any irony whatsoever.

By an irony of fate, my first employment was as a draughtsman. I hated drawing; it was for me the very worst of annoyances. Fortunately, it was not long before I secured the position I sought, that of chief electrician to the telephone company.

Well, certainly one of the ironies of the success of affirmative action is that the middle class within the black community no longer lives within ‘black community’ by and large.

In the end, there is no absence of irony: the integrity of what is sacred to Native Americans will be determined by the government that has been responsible for doing everything in its power to destroy Native American cultures.

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

People are apprehensive about finding ‘The Leftovers‘ funny because it’s such a dark circumstance, but I think, really, what the show is about is examining how different people deal with loss. There are elements of humour and levity and irony in that… just like in real life.

Melodrama is one of the most stunning art forms. These are stories where the emotions are big, and the situations are big, and the artists believe in the situation dramatically. There’s no irony or distance.

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.

That so unlikely an outcome should accrue to a man possessed of such limited talent and so many flaws, and one lacking in a sense of ethics and decency was one of the bitter ironies of history.

I like the irony in my work.

I like grit. I like love and death. I’m tired of irony.

I adore jokes. They’re a theatrical contrivance, but the irony of all fiction is that you approach reality by avoiding it a bit; you spoof it a bit.

Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.

I’m most interested in finding the strangeness and irony in reality. That’s my forte.

It could draw from a greater reservoir of freedom. The irony could develop an even greater ease.

Henry Blodget does occasionally have a new idea. If you’re making a point about aggregation or the emptiness of modern journalism, he’s far from the best target. Try Huffpo – or Gawker writers whose souls have been corroded by irony.

There’s a delicious irony in seeing private luxury jets flying in to Washington, D.C., and people coming off of them with tin cups in their hands saying that they’re going to be trimming down and streamlining their businesses. There’s a message there.

I don’t mock things, which makes me more vulnerable to mockery myself. If you’re cynical, you’re protected from mockery. But I have to be nice. I don’t think I have irony. A sense of humour, yes, but not irony.

That’s the irony in the work: the best stories are the worst things that happen. My best times were somebody else‘s worst.

Of course the 19th century remained in blissful ignorance of post-modern irony, and the dime novels were made without end.

All of Vegas is false. There’s a false Paris, a false Venice, a false Baghdad – in fact, all of the early Vegas aesthetic is Baghdad, which is also the irony. It’s ‘Aladdin,’ the sands, ‘One Thousand and One Nights.’

England and Denmark have a sense of irony and a darker sense of humour that you don’t necessarily find in Germany and Sweden.

I want to see Brian Williams with no irony wearing a mustache.

The irony is that I’m actually a very empathetic person, but I don’t believe in sympathy at all.

One of sports journalism’s great ironies is that covering an Olympics can be wildly unhealthy. NBC shows athletes in peak health performing on the ice and snow, but not the haggard reporters subsisting for three weeks on stadium starches, cheap beer, deadlines, and little sleep.

For years, young adults have adopted extremely liberal world views in their attempts to be different, ultimately failing to see the irony that they’ve all become the same.

Which is a wonderful irony, I have property there. I go back every chance I get. One of the main reasons I actually wrote the book, agreed to write it having never wanted to do that in my life, very intimidating by the way to write a book.

I do think we’ve become so reliant that the phones are never out of our reach. We’re always trying to stay connected that way and the irony is that it’s actually disconnecting us from everything else because we’re not just focused on what’s in front of us; we focus on what’s in our hand or off to the side.

I have survivor skills. Some of that is superficial – what I present to people outwardly – but what makes people resilient is the ability to find humour and irony in situations that would otherwise overpower you.

Irony is going to be hard to get. You have to be master of the literal first. But then, Americans don’t get irony either. Computers are going to reach the level of Americans before Brits.

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

I think people under age 55 come to Vegas with a certain sense of irony.

The irony of what I do is that the more you reveal someone in their frailties and shortcomings, the more we feel drawn to them and forgiving we feel of them.

The irony is, when people now compliment my ability to make something out of nothing on the football field, my mom is the one who’s been doing so in real life all along.

I was a bit of a humour black sheep. I would make these jokes full of irony and dark cynicism and that just didn’t work when I was seven, people did not laugh.

It’s one of the tragic ironies of the theatre that only one man in it can count on steady work – the night watchman.

I think that you can fall into bad habits with comedy… It’s a tightrope to stay true to the character, true to the irony, and allow the irony to happen.

You know, there’s a real irony in U.S. assistance programs. First of all, I think it’s misnamed. We’re not so much trying to help people as we’re trying to help ourselves. So let’s be clear about this. So these are – in my view, they’re cold calculations of national security and not aid programs.

In the end, we know what makes us happy. We also know what makes us unhappy. That’s the irony. We know and yet we still mess it up. That’s part of the human condition, no, and why we need to work on it.

The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.

The Internet has destroyed irony in the world, or at least wounded it considerably. What are we to do about an invention whose end result is that starving people in China are looking up things on marthastewart.com?

When I do the dodecahedron with the science audiences, I’ll point out that I can only do three of the five forms with bubbles, since bubbles only join at three-way corners. The two I can’t do are the ones that represent water and air. That always gets a big laugh from the mathematicians. They see the irony in it.

The irony is that kids are treated equally when it comes to tests and standards and expectations but not treated equally when providing funds to meet those standards and expectations.

From even the greatest of horrors, irony is seldom absent.

Skype is a wonderful thing. The irony is that you never Skype when you’re in the same country as someone.

Life is full of ironies and absurdities.

The main business of a lawyer is to take the romance, the mystery, the irony, the ambiguity out of everything he touches.

We like to think, in our anthropocentric way, that irony means that you transcended something, but actually, what it means is that you’ve realised that you’re stuck in something, and you have this kind of uncanny awareness of that, and there’s not much you can do about that feeling of stuckness.

Probably it is impossible for humor to be ever a revolutionary weapon. Candide can do little more than generate irony.

We’re not big on irony in Jamaica, sarcasm and double-talk. We tend to say things plainly, sometimes to the point of boredom.

The irony is that the more unapologetically sexist men are in movies, the more women tend to be attracted to them in person.

A tragic irony of life is that we so often achieve success or financial independence after the chief reason for which we sought it has passed away.

People are tough. We’re evolved for less food; more exercise; less sleep; less security; more paranoia. The irony is that we’re so good at what we do. We strive for more food; less exercise; more sleep; more security; less paranoia – and we’ve succeeded.

We didn’t understand irony yet in the ’80s; we just kind of existed at face value, so there was no nerd cool yet because the digital revolution was still in its infancy.

I’m really into the irony of writing vaguely radical plays that instantly win huge establishment awards. It’s really amusing.

My first black-on-black picture was ‘The Portrait of an Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self.’ I started using it as an emblem of this undercurrent of wickedness, malevolence, and irony – all of that.

I love Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart because they’re bringing irony back into American humor, which is a delicious treat. The entire Colbert persona of being extreme right-wing when he’s not at all is highly amusing. He does it so well, but sometimes a little too well. My wife is convinced he’s completely that way.

Cervantes is the most important Spanish writer. But he is not the most representative of the Spanish. His irony, his sense of humor – they are too subtle to seem Spanish.

As I write, I control my anxiety and anguish thanks to the invaluable aid of irony and humor. But every night I am subdued by an anxiety that knows no irony, and I must wait until the next day to rediscover the blend of anguish and humor that characterizes my writing and that generates my style.

In mainstream literature, a trope is a figure of speech: metaphor, simile, irony, or the like. Words used other than literally. In SF, a trope – at least as I understand the usage – is more: science used other than literally.

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.

I have a huge fear of crowds. The irony is that my band is a therapeutic exercise. I hurl myself into thousands of people.

I love British television. I love the irony, I love the authenticity and I love the roles I get put up for.

This commitment to truth is something one senses more and more Americans yearning for, just as they are becoming more and more sophisticated at knowing when the truth is being obscured – an irony that seems to elude most of today‘s elected officials.

This is what the establishment is scared of: Of joy, the sense of humour, of irony.

Am I disappointed occasionally by the lack of irony in some movies? Yes.

People use irony as a defense mechanism.

The irony is that the people we tend to vote for actually look down on voters and voting. That’s just idiotic, right? That’s like a snake eating its own tail! A wolf in a trap gnawing off its own head to escape!

It’s kind of a terrible irony, in a way, that the solution to America’s problems was World War II.

The irony of the Supreme Court hearing on these cases last week and of the outright hostility that the Court has displayed against religion in recent years is that above the head of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is a concrete display of the Ten Commandments.

There’s something about Vonnegut’s deadpan irony that I really like. And I like Borges’ puzzle structure.

We should try to understand our innermost needs. We shouldn’t use irony to reduce their power.

And the irony is that they wrote better without access to my quotes.

It would no doubt be very sentimental to argue – but I would argue it nevertheless – that the peculiar combination of joy and sadness in bell music – both of clock chimes, and of change-ringing – is very typical of England. It is of a piece with the irony in which English people habitually address one another.

We all want to be special, to stand out; there’s nothing wrong with this. The irony is that every human being is special to start with, because we’re unique to start with. But we then go through some sort of boot camp from the age of zero to about 18 where we learn everything we can about how not to be unique.

For me, true kitsch has nothing to do with irony. It’s very honest. It represents what people like, their dreams.

The irony of the media and people in big cities is that they’re charged with defining the entire culture, when in reality they don’t even live in that culture. They live in such a rarified, tiny world.

I think the great irony of history will be that it was a secular billionaire from New York who turned out the be the most faith-friendly president in history.

Nobody gets irony anymore, as we are now living in the post-ironic age. Once George Bush gets a library, our irony is dead.

The irony is of course that my career has lasted a whole lot longer than some of the people I’ve parodied over the years.

Irony is the recourse of the weak-minded wimp, I think. I hate bands that deliver their songs with knowing smiles on their faces, so that if those songs fall flat they can say ‘Ah well, we never really meant it anyway.’ It’s so dishonest.

You don’t service a big, fun premise comedy and then shoot yourself in the foot with too much irony. You need the audience to invest in the fun and the warmth and generally care about the characters.

You hear a lot of rap songs about spending money. I thought, wouldn’t it be funny to make a song about saving money because it’s ironic, but beyond irony, I genuinely have pride in saving money.

The great irony was that the punks were more conservative and narrow-minded and musically bigoted that anyone else.

I am aware it’s easy and may be fashionable to pose with a slum child, and the irony of getting the media along means that it can come across as disingenuous. But you take these things on board, and you hope you mean it whenever you get stuck into something.

The irony is that, coming from a white-collar British background, I tend to play blue-collar Americans!

I could write a joke song really easily, but I think something that might be true for my generation is that there’s a certain irony or detachedness expected of us, even though we really feel sincere. So the only way to sincerity is through a joke.

Acting is a craft to me: I just think you get better the more you do it. And then the irony to that is your doing it is not in your control. If it was up to most actors, we’d work all the time, and we’d always get better. But it’s not in our control, so we have to wait to be given parts to do.

I love the irony of movies. I really do. For whatever reason, I’m incredibly intrigued by the irony of reality in a motion picture.

Bourgeois values aren’t just for white people. The irony is: Bourgeois values can help minorities get ahead.

In a world where irony reigns, where you have to separate, protect and laugh at anything that is honest or has an emotional charge, I bet for catharsis. I like to invest emotionally in things. And catharsis, when it touches the emotional vein, can open the doors of even those who protect themselves.

Anti-capitalism is nothing new in Hollywood. From ‘Wall-E’ to ‘Avatar,’ corporations are routinely depicted as evil. The contradiction of corporate-funded films denouncing corporations is an irony capitalism cannot just absorb, but thrive on. Yet this anti-capitalism is only allowed within limits.

By some estimates, 80% of rap music is bought by white youth. And this makes for another irony. The blooming of white alienation has brought us the first generation of black entrepreneurs with wide-open access to the American mainstream.

The exact meaning of irony is so narrow that the word is hardly worth using; in its broad, current definition, it’s a euphemism for sarcasm. ‘I’m not being sarcastic; I’m being ironic.’ No, you’re not. You’re evading the responsibility for being sarcastic.

Looking around at the faces of the home support at Gillingham, the irony was never lost on me that these people had the cheek to call me a ‘freak.’ Perhaps they should have taken a look at themselves first.

One of the hardest things I’ve encountered whilst working on ‘Pippin’ is the consistent irony, as a reflection from the core material of the show, within my own life.

With obvious irony, many of the left-leaning privacy advocates who might cheer Apple‘s stand against the government’s intrusion into its system, are now, as transparency advocates, on the side of the leakers of the Panama Papers.

I think that true love, fairy tales, the positive messages of positive stories – I don’t think those ever die. Sometimes we like to hide them in sarcasm or irony, but they are still there, and they still move us.

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.

I like to have my characters talking in an up-to-date way, and I like their essentially modern self-awareness, which means we can have lots of irony and jokes.

I don’t have a constituency, and I’m not autobiographical in any way. I write these deeply moral books in a country which would prefer irony to anything with a moral tone.

One of the major issues that’s constantly batted around Hollywood and the media is my industry‘s responsibility toward the portrayal of violence. There’s the irony of the films that glorify it and the individuals taking positions against it. It’s a very confusing, confounding place.

I don’t like irony and sarcasm very much. But I do like it when you think someone is telling you a joke, and then you discover it’s serious.

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

I don’t embrace irony, but I do think it’s a pre-existing condition; we manage it as best we can.

Every man imagines that he will turn his suit like a double agent, that it can be twisted to his will with irony or comedy, that the man can undermine its origins.