Absurd Quotes - page 26

It is human life you value isn't it? Not its worth. Just human life. As if it were gold and could be neither good nor bad nor worth more nor worth less but must always be worth the same no matter what. One human life is one human life to you. You are absurd! Like your democracy, which you imagine you got from the Greeks, who had slaves. One vote for each person. What a stupid idea! The worst in your eyes possess the same value as the best. You have no way of differentiating between them. (Alex Miller (novelist))
This foolish idea of shooting at the moon is an example of the absurd length to which vicious specialisation will carry scientists working in thought-tight compartments .... For a projectile entirely to escape the gravitation of the Earth, it needs a velocity of 7 miles a second. The thermal energy of a gramme at this speed is 15180 calories .... The energy of our most violent explosive - nitroglycerine - is less than 1500 calories per grammer. Consequently, even had the explosive nothing to carry, it has only one tenth of the energy to escape the Earth ... hence the proposition appears to be basically unsound. View quote
A.W. Bickerton
There is always something rather absurd about the past. View quote
Max Beerbohm
[T]he South looked like anything but a market society, and no matter that slavery was based on the absurd and irrational prejudice of race; slavery's greatest attractions were its cheapness, its capacity for violent exploitation, and its mobility. View quote
Allen C. Guelzo
How will you construct the gun that will stand this strain? ... you will enter the shell and detonate the explosive and start off at 7 miles a second. That is, you get a blow 50 times as hard as if struck by a Big Bertha shell. Clearly, you are flattened like a pancake. The bump is equal to a fall from a height of many thousands of miles .... This foolish idea of shooting at the moon is an example of the absurd length to which vicious specialisation will carry scientists working in thought-tight compartments .... all these errors could be easily avoided by correlative meetings of groups of different scientists investigating all kinds of cosmic problems. This is the work the Correlative Science Society, established by the Royal Botanic Society, has been attempting to do with most encouraging results. View quote
A.W. Bickerton
In my opinion, the premise of CO2 burial seems absurd not only because of the lack of supporting evidence for certain climate change, but also due to it's lack of foresight as to the effects of the burial scheme. View quote
Anthony Watts
America has never paid any attention to other people, so it's absurd for Bush to say that it's all in the best interests of the Iraqi people. View quote
Richard Gere
If at first an idea does not sound absurd, then there is no hope for it. -ALBERT EINSTEIN. View quote
Michio Kaku
Courage moral and physical: 'anima'-the ability to think like a woman. Also a sense of the absurd. Courage moral and physical: "anima”-the ability to visualize the mind and need of a man. Also a sense of the absurd. View quote
Christopher Hitchens
My dear wife has, I would say, probably never opened a religious book, and seems to be one of those people to whom the whole idea is utterly remote and absurd. View quote
Christopher Hitchens
But I can't bear it when somebody who some man made a pass at - to call that violence seems to me absurd and insulting to women who've really met violence, who've been raped or bashed. (Helen Garner)
We are not so absurd as to propose that the teacher should not set forth his own opinions as the true ones and exert his utmost powers to exhibit their truth in the strongest light. View quote
John Stuart Mill
The more I grow older, the more the Gnosis speaks to my reason, the world isn't ruled by a Providence, it's intrisically evil, deeply absurd, and Creation is the dream of a blind intellect or a game of a principle without a moral. View quote
Albert Caraco
A refuge is supposed to prevent what? The genes from flowing out of sight? This refuge idea won't stop insects from moving across boundaries. That's absurd. View quote
Jeremy Rifkin
The reduction of a society and culture to dependence on mathematical abstraction has infantilised a grown-up civilisation and is well on the way to destroying it. Civilisations self-destruct anyway, but it is reasonable to ask whether they have done so before with such enthusiasm, in obedience to such an acutely absurd superstition, while claiming with such insistence that they were beyond being seduced by the irrational promises of religion. View quote
David Fleming
I don't think I said anything about the Third Dimension; and I am sure I did not say one word about 'Upward, not Northward', for that would be such nonsense, you know. How could a thing move Upward, and not Northward? Upward and not Northward! Even if I were a baby, I could not be so absurd as that. View quote
Edwin Abbott Abbott
Yes, society must go on; it must breed, like rabbits. That is what we are here for. But then, I don't like society - much. I am that absurd figure, an American millionaire, who has bought one of the ancient haunts of English peace. I sit here, in Edward's gun-room, all day and all day in a house that is absolutely quiet. No one visits me, for I visit no one. No one is interested in me, for I have no interests. View quote
Ford Madox Ford
That it is a perfect absurdity to suppose that any body of men would ever take a man's money without his consent, for any such object as they profess to take it for, viz., that of protecting him; for why should they wish to protect him, if he does not wish them to do so? To suppose that they would do so, is just as absurd as it would be to suppose that they would take his money without his consent, for the purpose of buying food or clothing for him, when he did not want it. View quote
Lysander Spooner
One observed a number of discordant features – a feminine sensibility, a delight in the absurd, a taste for exaggeration and melodrama, a very mature judgement and then some lack of human substance, some hereditary thinness in the blood that at times gave people who met him an odd feeling in the spine. He seemed almost indecently lacking in ordinariness. View quote
Lytton Strachey
I came at last to a recognition of myself as, in part, a Tom Sawyer who wanted everything done according to the rules of romantic fiction, and complicated simple solutions with his absurd adolescent, book-born nonsense. View quote
Robertson Davies
Hullo! What's this? What are these funny brown-and-olive landscapes doing in an impressionist exhibition? Brown! I ask you? Isn't it absurd for a man to go on using brown and call himself an impressionist painter? (Frank Rutter)
I'm a national security liberal, which I tell people because it's meant to sound absurd. View quote
Rachel Maddow
We have absolutely nothing to hide ... This is a disgrace and absurd and will go down as an expense. Go through everything you want at anytime as we have nothing to hide, but you pay for it, as the foundation would rather spend the 10,000 dollars on children in need than on an audit. It's a real shame that certain journalists are continuing this ridiculous crusade/personal vendetta against the foundation & I can't understand why. The board, patrons, ambassadors & everyone else involved at the foundation donate their time to make a significant difference to children & their families, which we have. We have saved children's lives & without our support would not be on this planet. View quote
Shane Warne
He who wishes to exert a useful influence must be careful to insult nothing. Let him not be troubled by what seems absurd, but concentrate his energies to the creation of what is good. He must not demolish, but build. He must raise temples where mankind may come and partake of the purest pleasure. View quote
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The suffering may be moral or physical; and in my opinion it is just as absurd to call a man a coward who destroys himself, as to call a man a coward who dies of a malignant fever. View quote
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe