Irony Quotes

Sentimental irony is a dog that bays at the moon while pissing on graves. (Karl Kraus)
The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive. View quote
Robert A. Heinlein
If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom, and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too. View quote
W. Somerset Maugham
Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is what is good and great at the same time. View quote
Friedrich Schlegel
Irony is the gaiety of reflection and the joy of wisdom. View quote
Anatole France
I love the irony of movies. I really do. For whatever reason, I'm incredibly intrigued by the irony of reality in a motion picture. View quote
Zack Snyder
From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent. View quote
H. P. Lovecraft
At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. View quote
Frederick Douglass
No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die. View quote
Don DeLillo
What is called music today is all too often only a disguise for the monologue of power. However, and this is the supreme irony of it all, never before have musicians tried so hard to communicate with their audience, and never before has that communication been so deceiving. Music now seems hardly more than a somewhat clumsy excuse for the self-glorification of musicians and the growth of a new industrial sector. View quote
Jacques Attali
A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance-you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke. (Arthur Miller)
We should try to understand our innermost needs. We shouldn't use irony to reduce their power. View quote
Manuel Puig
My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it. View quote
Mark Haddon
A tragic irony of life is that we so often achieve success or financial independence after the chief reason for which we sought it has passed away. View quote
Ellen Glasgow
Certainly, it seems true enough that there's a good deal of irony in the world... I mean, if you live in a world full of politicians and advertising, there's obviously a lot of deception. View quote
Kenneth Koch
The grand irony, however, is that Southern segregation was not brought to an end, nor redneck violence dramatically reduced, by violence. View quote
Stanley Crouch
Sadness is the matrix from which wit and irony spring; sadness is uncomfortable and creative, which is why consumer society cannot tolerate it. View quote
Germaine Greer
I moved to New England partly because it has a real literary past. The ghosts of Hawthorne and Melville still sit on those green hills. The worship of Mammon is also somewhat lessened there by the spirit of irony. I don't get hay fever in New England either. View quote
John Updike
The main business of a lawyer is to take the romance, the mystery, the irony, the ambiguity out of everything he touches. View quote
Antonin Scalia
Irony is a clear consciousness of an eternal agility, of the infinitely abundant chaos. View quote
Friedrich Schlegel
I always thought the biggest failing of Americans was their lack of irony. They are very serious there! Naturally, there are exceptions... the Jewish, Italian, and Irish humor of the East Coast. (Colin Firth)
I think that you can fall into bad habits with comedy... It's a tightrope to stay true to the character, true to the irony, and allow the irony to happen. View quote
Ben Kingsley
The world changes, we do not, therein lies the irony that kills us. View quote
Anne Rice
A wonderful physical tie binds the parents to the children; and - by some sad, strange irony - it does not bind us children to our parents. For if it did, if we could answer their love not with gratitude but with equal love, life would lose much of its pathos and much of its squalor, and we might be wonderfully happy. View quote
E. M. Forster
Neither irony or sarcasm is argument. View quote
Samuel Butler (novelist)