Themes

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"... 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"Life is never free of contradictions."

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

". . . 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?"

"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."

"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"?"

"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."

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

"...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."

"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."

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."