Themes

"One purpose of physics is to study the motion of objects—how fast they move, for example, and how far they move in a given amount of time. NASCAR engineers are fanatical about this aspect of physics as they determine the performance of their cars before and during a race. Geologists use this physics to measure tectonic-plate motion as they attempt to predict earthquakes. Medical researchers need this physics to map the blood flow through a patient when diagnosing a partially closed artery, and motorists use it to determine how they might slow sufficiently when their radar detector sounds a warning."

"Jonah - Chapter 10, Verses 68-69, Holy Koran They say, Allah has got a son! Whereas He is the Most Sacrosanct And the Self-Sufficient One. Everything that is in the skies And the earth belongs to God. You have no proof to show! Do you allege about Allah what you don’t know? Say, whoever fabricates lies against Allah the Truthful Will never ever be successful."

"Pulitzer Prizes are the preeminent mark of achievement in American journalism. As the prizes for reporting on Vietnam in defiance of official wishes show, they also point to the press's view of its role in society. That view has changed substantially over the more than eighty years of the Pulitzer Prizes' existence. Exposing official corruption on a local level had always been part of what journalists see as their function. But today, more than ever before, they are ready to write critically about the policies of the federal government, even in the once sacrosanct areas of foreign and national security affairs."

"It is the sacrosanct duty of the government to follow the law and the pronouncements of the court and not to take recourse to such subterfuges. The government should have reminded itself of the saying of Benjamin Disraeli: 'I repeat - that all power is a trust - that we are accountable for its exercise - that, from the people and for the people, all springs, and all must exist."

"The time has gone by when a Huxley could believe that while science might indeed remould traditional mythology, traditional morals were impregnable and sacrosanct to it. We must learn not to take traditional morals too seriously."

"Sex is an emotion in motion."

"The connection to place, to the land, the wind, the sun, stars, the moon... it sounds romantic, but it's true - the visceral experience of motion, of moving through time on some amazing machine - a few cars touch on it, but not too many compared to motorcycles. I always felt that any motorcycle journey was special."

"The fate of this man or that man was less than a drop, although it was a sparkling one, in the great blue motion of the sunlit sea."

"Look at what you want to change, gather a few people who believe in it like you do, and start moving forward. It's important to remember that you don't always need a destination. Sometimes, you just have to make forward motion. And you absolutely can."

"Revenge... is like a rolling stone, which, when a man hath forced up a hill, will return upon him with a greater violence, and break those bones whose sinews gave it motion."

"Painting is concerned with all the 10 attributes of sight; which are: Darkness, Light, Solidity and Colour, Form and Position, Distance and Propinquity, Motion and Rest."

"Dead Metaphors, which are emptied of original meaning, are: Fabulous (fable and awful), awful(ly) good, terribly good, damned good, many fewer, barely clothed, exactly wrong, clearly obfuscating, far nearer, kind of cruel, hardly easy, a little big, growing small, wicked good (product of American slang)"

"Single-word Oxymora Composed of Dependent Morphemes are: wise fool; pianoforte, soft-loud, preposterous ("before-after"),, and superette ("big-small")."

"The word oxymoron is itself oxymoronic because it is formed from two Greek roots of opposite meaning, 'oxys' "sharp, keen," and 'moros' "foolish," the same root that gives us the word moron."

"Single-word Oxymora Composed of Independent Morphemes, that could each be a word in itself, such as spendthrift, bridegroom, bittersweet, ballpoint, speechwriting, firewater and someone."

"Logological Oxymora are words as surface letter combinations such as nook joins the opposing words no and OK, and the name Noyes, no and yes."

"I learned why 'out riding alone' is an oxymoron: An equestrian is never alone, is always sensing the other being, the mysterious but also understandable living being that is the horse."

"Romeo and Juliet, Act 1. Scene 1, in which Romeo utters nine oxymora in just six lines of soliloquy: Why then, O brawling love, O loving hate: O anything, from nothing first create, O heavy lightness! Serious vanity! Mis-shapen chaos of well-seeming forms, Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health, Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is! This love feel I, that feel no love in this. Dost though not laugh?"

"Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings though has perfected praise... is the perfect oxymoron."

"Sex and older women used to be considered an oxymoron, rarely mentioned in the same breath."

"'Feminist comedy,' practically an oxymoron, had a couple of good years after WWII. Chalk it up to the forced female autonomy that occurred during wartime, when Rosie the Riveter went to work in the factories, constructing the Allies' war machines while taking charge of the finances, the home, and the children."

"Independent film is not only an oxymoron; it doesn't exist anymore."

"Natural Oxymora are in pairs such as: inside out, student teacher, working vacation, small fortune, industrial park, open secret, sight unseen, loyal opposition, idiot savant, light heavyweight. original copy, final draft, random order, freezer burn, negative growth, standard deviation, build-down, elevated subway, mobile home, benign neglect, fresh frozen, deliberate speed, benevolent despot, recorded live, one-man band, old boy, and living end. The perception of these duos as oxymora is relatively direct and effortless and does not depend on plays on words or personal values."

"Oxymorons, often hilarious contradictory expressions, are sure to be the next delightful word craze, and... some of the best oxymorons around--phrases such as "pretty ugly", "plastic glasses", and many more."

"Successful therapy is an oxymoron."

"An 'oxymoron' is a figure of speech using an intended combination of two apparently contradictory terms."

"Plantation forests and Biodiversity: Oxymoron or Opportunity?"

"In the church scene in the [Shakespeare's] Much Ado About Nothing, Claudio rejects the supposedly evil hero:But fare thee well, most foul, most fair! Farewell, Though pure impiety and impious purity! While there is actual Oxymoron in the second of these lines, we have, in the first, not an actual oxymoron but what may be called an expanded oxymoron."

"Placing 'w:Amicableamicable' and 'separation' together creates an oxymoron - we don't usually decide to end a partnership until the very sight of our soon-to-be ex fills us with disgust, misery, agony or a combination of all three."

"Time management is an oxymoron. Time is beyond our control, and the clock keeps ticking regardless of how we lead our lives. Priority management is the answer to maximizing the time we have."

"Conversion Puns are a group of oxymoronic pairs that rely on the coexistence of two parts of speech for the same word. Examples are: press release, kickstand, divorce court, building wrecking and White Rose."

"The term 'serious actor' is kind of an oxymoron, isn't it? Like 'Republican party' or 'airplane food.'"

"The rhetorical figure that summarizes the idea of semantic paradox is the oxymoron. An oxymoron is an opposition between a term and the qualification that is given it, or between two qualities attributed to a single term, or between the simultaneous denial and assertion of the same fact or concept. The Greek expression “to oxymoron” refers, literally, to the “acutely mad”. The oxymoron is the essence of semantic contradiction whose variants are the paradox and the antithesis. Oxymoron is a semantic approximation of opposites."

"You know, my degrees are in computer engineering. I spent a lot of time in the tech industry. And I like to say that I don't invest in tech because I spent time in it. And I saw firsthand that the durability of technology moats is many times an oxymoron."

"The orators ... frequently take the fact that the prosecutor was not himself wronged as a sign that the prosecution is sychophantic...The sychophant characteristically acts after the event and rakes up old charges...If men do not contest charges immediately but later, they are regarded as sychophants and poneroi (vulgar people)."

"The oxymoron is preferred by the mystic because it allows him to express something ineffable, because it is the best tool for speaking of the unspeakable, because in the world of duality it creates the ‘'coincidentia oppositorum’', which Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464), in the context of his theology of the Incarnate Word, considered almost the least imperfect definition of God. The mystic, in his talk of God, punctuated by ‘'improprietas’', ‘'voces obscurae, horridae, inauditae’', seeks through a paroxysmal accumulation of oxymorons to linguistically touch the divine."

"The powerful, if they carry oppression beyond a certain point, necessarily end by making themselves adored by their slaves. For the thought of being under absolute compulsion, the plaything of another, is unendurable for a human being. Hence, if every way of escape from the constraint is taken from him, there is nothing left for him to do but to persuade himself that he does the things he is forced to do willingly, that is to say, to substitute devotion for obedience. ... It is by this twist that slavery debases the soul: this devotion is in fact based on a lie, since the reasons for it cannot bear investigation. ... Moreover, the master is deceived too by the fallacy of devotion."

"An orator was most in need of rhetorical means of reinscribing himself within the realm of the pitiable when faced with charges of "sycophancy," that mysterious and vilified form of prosecution, whose name literally means "pointing out" or displaying figs. In classical Athens the term "sycophancy" did not refer to flattery but to some method of prosecuting that was not socially acceptable. The sychophant was somehow the opposite of the upright legitimate democratic prosecutor. Accusing one’s opponent of being a sychophant was one of the most powerful weapons in the rhetorical arsenal because the word sychophant specially directed the audience to consider the degree to which a prosecutor had veered from the city’s system of value."

"In terms of the romantic kind of lead, I just never enjoy those movies very much. Maybe they'll come to interest me more as I get older. I doubt it, but maybe. Romantic comedies tend to be, for me, an oxymoron."

"A few steps brought us in full view of all the pomp, circumstance, and chivalry, bows and arrows, sycophants and rascals, with which the governor is usually surrounded."

"From his childhood onward this boy [the future Edward VIII.] will be surrounded by sycophants and flatterers by the score."

"The sycophant who, in the pay of the English oligarchy, played the romantic laudatory temporis acti against the French Revolution, just, as in the pay of the North American Colonies at the beginning of the American troubles, he had played the Liberal against the English oligarchy, was an out and out vulgar bourgeois."

"Nothing is more customary in man than to recognize superior wisdom in the person of his oppressor."

"An examination of the leaders and military assistants closest to Hitler – men such as Jodi and Keitel in the OKW and Ribbentrop, Himmler, Goering and Goebbels - reveals that almost all were sycophants. Ribbentrop and Goering, for example, carefully saw to it that Hitler received only the reports that confirmed his own beliefs and images."

"I personally think intellectual property is an oxymoron. Physical objects have a completely different natural economy than intellectual goods. It's a tricky thing to try to own something that remains in your possession even after you give it to many others."

"You moralistic dog—admitting a hierarchy in which you are subordinate, purely that you may have subordinates; licking the boots of a superior, that you may have yours in turn licked by an underling."

"I would rather a thousand times be a free soul in jail than to be a sycophant and coward in the streets."

"A poet’s prayer. Almighty Father! let thy lowly child, Strong in his love of truth, be wisely bold — , A patriot bard, by sycophants reviled, Let him live usefully, and not die old I, Let poor men's children, pleased to read his lays, Love, for his sake, the scenes where he hath been."

"Sycophant, n. One who approaches Greatness on his belly so that he may not be commanded to turn and be kicked."

"But how can he be honoured, when he does not honour himself; when he loses himself in the crowd; when he is no longer the lawgiver, but the sycophant, ducking to the giddy opinion of a reckless public; when he must sustain with shameless advocacy some bad government,..."