Quotes about irony

“And there aren’t any.”

“Mmm,” I said. “Awkward.”

“That’s defeatist talk. I’ll cobble something together. A scholar can never let mere wrongness get in the way of the theory.”

“‘Government of the people, by the people, and for the people.’ Yeah, trouble is, the three classes of people aren’t the same.”

“Where is he?”

“Doing things he finds very important. I would fault him for it, as I find nothing more frightening than a man trying to do what he has decided is important. Very little in the world has ever gone astray—at least on a grand scale—because a person decided to be frivolous.”

"Mr Dangerfield, why don't you believe in hell and things like that?"

"Hell is for poor people."

Buddhists and Christians contrive to agree about death

Making death their ideal basis for different ideals.

The Communists however disapprove of death

Except when practical.

Incompetence is rewarded more often than not.

“I see what Gene is driving at. To dream of changing the whole universe in accordance with a set of local preconceptions!...Oh, it’s ridiculous!”

“A missionary,” Gene repeated with a solemn nod. “By definition: a person who does without intending it more harm than good.”

She was on a pediflow, and—like so many of the devices which twenty-first century ingenuity had made available to mankind—that was something which seemed to have been destined for an altogether more rational species than the one she belonged to.

UNFAIR   Term applied to advantages enjoyed by other people which we tried to cheat them out of and didn’t manage.

LEADERSHIP   A form of self-preservation exhibited by people with autodestructive imaginations in order to ensure that when it comes to the crunch it’ll be someone else’s bones which go crack and not their own.

Apparently, sir you Chinese are far ahead of us in every respect, except that you don’t have entrepreneurs. And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality, ‘’does’’ have entrepreneurs. Thousands and thousands of them. Especially in the field of technology. And these entrepreneurs—’’we’’ entrepreneurs—have set up all these outsourcing companies that virtually run America now.

"If you were half as funny as you thought you were, my boy, you'd be twice as funny as you are."