Quotes about irony

It turns out 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. I can’t imagine anything worse than that. Okay, maybe I can, but imagine reading the morning newspaper and believing it all to be true on some level.

People who advocate simplicity have money in the bank; the money came first, not the simplicity. (from inside the cover)

Christopher Columbus landed first in the New World at the island of San Salvador, and after praising God enquired urgently for gold.

After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive.

Work a lifetime to pay off a house — You finally own it and there's nobody to live in it.

What was the good working for freedom all your life and ending up without any freedom at all?

It was turning into a sly, anti–free market statement, and irony irritated him. There was no place for irony in marketing: it made people want to look for deeper meaning. There was no place in marketing for that, either.

Individualism is going around these days in uniform, handing out the party line on individualism.

The duty of "saving" became nine-tenths of virtue and the growth of the cake the object of true religion.

The irony is that in our decades, the combination of rationalism, asceticism, and individualism (the so-called Protestant Ethic) has produced precisely the system of boondoggling, luxury-consumption, and status.

A traffic jam when you're already late,

A "No Smoking" sign on your cigarette break.

It's like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife.

It's meeting the man of my dreams

And then meeting his beautiful wife.And isn't it ironic?

Don't you think?

A little too ironic,

And yeah, I really do think.

The ironist is not bitter, he does not seek to undercut everything that seems worthy or serious, he scorns the cheap scoring-off of the wisecracker. He stands, so to speak, somewhat at one side, observes and speaks with a moderation which is occasionally embellished with a flash of controlled exaggeration. He speaks from a certain depth, and thus he is not of the same nature as the wit, who so often speaks from the tongue and no deeper. The wit's desire is to be funny; the ironist is only funny as a secondary achievement.