Contradiction

"He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife."

"The conflicts that tear society apart resemble the distinction between the concept and the particular facts subordinated to it. ... Whatever refuses to abide by the unity imposed by the principle of dominion manifests itself not as something indifferent to that principle, but as an infringement of logic: as a contradiction."

"Nothing which implies contradiction falls under the omnipotence of God."

"It is... axiomatic that we should all think of ourselves as being more sensitive than other people because, when we are insensitive in our dealings with others, we cannot be aware of it at the time: conscious insensitivity is a self-contradiction."

"I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction."

"...Erich Fromm wondered why most people did not become insane in the face of the existential contradiction between a symbolic self, that seems to give man infinite worth in a timeless scheme of things, and a body that is worth about 98¢."

"Do what you will, this world's a fiction and is made up of contradiction,"

"Everything must be recaptured and relocated in the general framework of history, so that despite the difficulties, the fundamental paradoxes and contradictions, we may respect the unity of history which is also the unity of life."

"Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions."

"Every morning I shall concern myself anew about the boundary Between the love-deed-Yes and the power-deed-No And pressing forward honor reality.We cannot avoid Using power, Cannot escape the compulsion To afflict the world, So let us, cautious in diction And mighty in contradiction, Love powerfully."

"A quarter of America is a dramatic, tense, violent country, exploding with contradictions, full of brutal, physiological vitality, and that is the America that I have really loved and love. But a good half of it is a country of boredom, emptiness, monotony, brainless production, and brainless consumption, and this is the American inferno."

"I never saw a contradiction between the ideas that sustain me and the ideas of that symbol, of that extraordinary figure Jesus Christ."

"On the way to the wardrobe I thought I would dress in baggy pants, big shoes, and a cane and a derby hat. I wanted everything to be a contradiction; the pants baggy, the coat tight, the hat small and the shoes large. I was undecided whether to look young or old , but remembering Sennet had expected me to be a much older man, I added a small moustache, which I reasoned, would add age without hiding my expression."

"Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die."

"Enlightened leadership is spiritual if we understand spirituality not as some kind of religious dogma or ideology but as the domain of awareness where we experience values like truth, goodness, beauty, love and compassion, and also intuition, creativity, insight and focused attention."

"The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning."

"So you're trying to make her happy despite the fact that the reason she'd unhappy in the first place is you," said Simon not very kindly. "That seems contradictory, doesn't it?" "Love is a contradiction," said Jace, and turned back to the window."

"Jesus lived a life that was full of joy and contradictions and fights, you know? If they were to paint a picture of Jesus without contradictions, the gospels would be fake, but the contradictions are a sign of authenticity."

"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."

"Else if you would be a man speak what you think to-day in words as hard as cannon balls, and to-morrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day."

"I am very conscious of the fact that our feelings and strivings are often contradictory and obscure and that they cannot be expressed in easy and simple formulas."

"Motion itself is a contradiction."

"... one of the basic principles of higher mathematics is the contradiction that in certain circumstances straight lines and curves may be the same.... But even lower mathematics teems with contradictions."

"If simple mechanical change of place contains a contradiction, this is even more true of the higher forms of motion of matter, and especially of organic life and its development... life consists precisely and primarily in this--that a being is at each moment itself and yet something else. Life is therefore also a contradiction which is present in things and processes themselves, and which constantly originates and resolves itself; and as soon as the contradiction ceases, life, too, comes to an end, and death steps in. We likewise saw that also in the sphere of thought we could not escape contradictions, and that for example the contradiction between man's inherently unlimited capacity for knowledge and its actual presence only in men who are externally limited and possess limited cognition finds its solution in what is--at least practically, for us--an endless succession of generations, in infinite progress."

"I have only found the key to the cipher of the Christian religion, only extricated its true meaning from the web of contradictions and delusions called theology."

"A strange contradiction the Mahatma was...there was a kind of androgynous, charismatic vitality that lurked within him , a dangerously effeminate quality that could provoke high anxiety."

"The people heard it, and approved the doctrine, and immediately practiced the contrary."

"Reason is man's faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man's ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. Reason is man's instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man's instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man."

"I am human, and I make mistakes. Therefore my commitment must be to truth and not to consistency."

"Paradoxes specific to the work are, in a sense, the counterpart of the contradictions of the perceivable world."

"That is exactly the point, what we agree with leaves us inactive, but contradiction makes us productive."

"The market came with the dawn of civilization and it is not an invention of capitalism. If it leads to improving the well-being of the people there is no contradiction with socialism."

"Bad Religion has never been about criticizing people who are Christian. But we've always been about pointing out the irony and contradictions in Christian theology and the more extreme versions of Christians that seek to challenge modern secularism."

"I try to get closer to reality, to get close to the contradictions. The cinema world can be a real world rather than a dream world."

"The prime requisite of a set of postulates is that it be consistent. Since the ordinary notion of consistency involves that of contradiction, which again involves negation, and since this function does not appear in general as a primitive in [the generalized set of postulates] a new definition must be given."

"Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it."

"It is also plausible that those movements with the greatest inner contradiction between profession and practice - that is to say with a strong feeling of guilt-are likely to be the most fervent in imposing their faith on others."

"When we examine the opinions of men, we find that nothing is more uncommon than common sense; or, in other words, they lack judgment to discover plain truths or to reject absurdities and palpable contradictions."

"Many of the contradictions in Postmodern art come from the fact that we're trying to be artists in a democratic society. This is because in a democracy, the ideal is compromise. In art, it isn't."

"In Afghan society, parents play a central role in the lives of their children; the parent-child relationship is fundamental to who you are and what you become and how you perceive yourself, and it is laden with contradictions, with tension, with anger, with love, with loathing, with angst."

"Do you think when two representatives holding diametrically opposing views get together and shake hands, the contradictions between our systems will simply melt away? What kind of a daydream is that?"

"All skepticism is a kind of idealism. Hence when the skeptic Zeno pursued the study of skepticism by endeavoring existentially to keep himself unaffected by whatever happened, so that when once he had gone out of his way to avoid a mad dog, he shamefacedly admitted that even a skeptical philosopher is also sometimes a man, I find nothing ridiculous in this. There is no contradiction, and the comical always lies in a contradiction."

"Really, life is full of contradictions. Life is messy."

"Dialectics in the proper sense is the study of contradiction in the very essence of objects."

"Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat."

"The very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God's mercy to me."

"Good taste and humor are a contradiction in terms, like a chaste whore."

"Capitalism is not so much an aberration as a step on an evolutionary path, and one that contains within it some of the answers to its own contradictions."

"Mohandas K.Gandhi often changed his mind publicly. An aide once asked him how he could so freely contradict this week what he had said just last week. The great man replied that it was because this week he knew better."

"...it is trite that contradictions per se do not lead to the rejection of a witness’s evidence and what the trier of fact has to take into consideration, are matters such as the nature of the contradictions; their number and importance, and their bearing on other parts of the witness’s evidence. These differences could either be immaterial to the charges the accused is facing or bona fide mistakes made by a witness."

"One is fruitful only at the cost of being rich in contradictions."

"After all, what would be "beautiful" if the contradiction had not first become conscious of itself, if the ugly had not first said to itself: "I am ugly"?"

"We must be physicists in order to be creative since so far codes of values and ideals have been constructed in ignorance of physics or even in contradiction to physics."

"Theories which are logically self-contradictory may be significant and fruitful just in so far as their self-contradictory."

"I'm fascinated by the ways in which people express themselves, because their responses are often counter to what they're actually feeling. Like when they're frightened, they tend to freeze. When they're angry, it doesn't always come out as volume. There are wonderful contradictions in the way that people express their emotions."

"I was listening to a lot of hip hop, music like Public Enemy that was about raising consciousness, and I realised I could feed that directly into my work, using images in a way that was a bit like sampling - taking images from diverse places, exploring the contradictions without trying to hide the seams."

"Is it not a species of blasphemy to call the New Testament revealed religion, when we see in it such contradictions and absurdities."

"Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth."

"What a chimera then is man! What a novelty! What a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, depository of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error, the glory and the shame of the universe."

". . . I in my astonishment said: What do you mean Dionysodorus? I have often heard, and have been amazed to hear, this thesis of yours, which is maintained and employed by the disciples of Protagoras and others before them, and which to me appears to be quite wonderful, and suicidal as well as destructive, and I think that I am most likely to hear the truth about it from you. The dictum is that there is no such thing as a falsehood; a man must either say what is true or say nothing. Is not that your position?"

"But when I describe something and you describe another thing, or I say something and you say nothing - Is there any contradiction? How can he who speaks contradict him who speaks not."

"He who comes from afar may lie without fear of contradiction as he is sure to be listened to with the utmost attention."

"Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong."

"Part of me is drawn to the nature of sadness because I think life is sad, and sadness is not something that should be avoided or denied. It's a fact of life, like contradictions are."

"Ever since Plato most philosophers have considered it part of their business to produce ‘proofs’ of immortality and the existence of God. They have found fault with the proofs of their predecessors — Saint Thomas rejected Saint Anselm's proofs, and Kant rejected Descartes' — but they have supplied new ones of their own. In order to make their proofs seem valid, they have had to falsify logic, to make mathematics mystical, and to pretend that deep seated prejudices were heaven-sent intuitions."

"Those laws, being forged for universal application, are in perpetual conflict with personal interest, just as personal interest is always in contradiction with the general interest. Good for society, our laws are very bad for the individuals whereof it is composed; for, if they one time protect the individual, they hinder, trouble, fetter him for three quarters of his life."

"The major religions on the Earth contradict each other left and right. You can't all be correct. And what if all of you are wrong? It's a possibility, you know. You must care about the truth, right? Well, the way to winnow through all the differing contentions is to be skeptical. I'm not any more skeptical about your religious beliefs than I am about every new scientific idea I hear about. But in my line of work, they're called hypotheses, not inspiration and not revelation."

"When you encounter difficulties and contradictions, do not try to break them, but bend them with gentleness and time."

"In art, and maybe just in general, the idea is to be able to be really comfortable with contradictory ideas. In other words, wisdom might be, seem to be, two contradictory ideas both expressed at their highest level and just let to sit in the same cage sort of, vibrating. So, I think as a writer, I'm really never sure of what I really believe."

"How can what an Englishman believes be hearsay? It is a contradiction in terms."

"Life is never free of contradictions."

"In love all the contradiction of existence merge themselves and are lost. Only in love are unity and duality not at variance. Love must be one and two at the same time."

"The person you are the most afraid to contradict is yourself."

"... I have something of a guess: Bohr liked paradoxes. I wanted to eliminate contradictions. He liked those contradictions. And — what I said so far is true — but what I am now going to say is probably true. And — Bohr liked contradictions with good reason ... The simple, straightforward way how we see the world ... it is not a wavefunction. It is something that I can describe and understand. If I don't start from such ideas then I can't possibly know what I'm talking about. ... You must start from practical theory with all the contradictions that a detailed observation then leads to. Then as a next step you resolve these contradictions."

"Marx believed, the contradictions of capitalism would lead to communism, a classless society that operates on the principle of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need."

"I don't think anyone now really understands the planetisation of mankind, really understands the new world order emerging through all this period of strain and pain and contradiction, so more than ever, we need to have an internal sense of navigation."

"Philosophy offers the rather cold consolation that perhaps we and our planet do not actually exist; religion presents the contradictory and scarcely more comforting thought that we exist but that we cannot hope to get anywhere until we cease to exist. Alcohol, in attempting to resolve the contradiction, produces vivid patterns of Truth which vanish like snow in the morning sun and cannot be recalled; the revelations of poetry are as wonderful as a comet in the skies , and as mysterious. Love, which was once believed to contain the Answer, we now know to be nothing more than an inherited behavior pattern."

"The universality or absoluteness of contradiction has a twofold meaning. One is that contradiction exists in the process of development of all things, and the other is that in the process of development of each thing a movement of opposites exists from beginning to end."

"Contradiction is present in the process of development of all things; it Italic textpermeates the process of development of each thing from beginning to end. This is the The universality and absoluteness of contradiction."

"The sciences are differentiated precisely on the basis of the particular contradictions inherent in their respective objects of study. Thus the contradiction peculiar to a certain field of phenomena constitutes the object of study for a specific branch of science. For example, positive and negative numbers in mathematics; action and reaction in mechanics; positive and negativeelectricity in physics; dissociation and combination in chemistry; forces of production and relations of production, classes and class struggle, in social science; offence and defence in military science; idealism and materialism, the metaphysical outlook and the dialectical outlook, in philosophy; and so on--all these are the objects of study of different branches of science precisely because each branch has its own particular contradiction and particular essence."

"The cardinal responsibility of leadership is to identify the dominant contradiction at each point of the historical process and to work out a central line to resolve it."

"If a man never contradicts himself, the reason must be that he virtually never says anything at all."

"As the new spirituality begins to become the pervasive spirituality of the planet, we'll find that we have abandoned our philosophy of contradictions in which we say we're all one but continue to try to win."

"My criticism of [Hegel's] procedure is that when in his discussion he arrives at a contradiction, he construes it as a crisis in the universe."

"Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

"The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves."

"The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another. Is there a way to erase the dilemma, to resolve the contradictions between the transcendentalist and the empiricist world views?"

"Propositions show what they say: tautologies and contradictions show that they say nothing."