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Contradictory to my religion, I think, is journalism. -- Sydney Schanberg
There's nothing more ironic or contradictory than life itself. -- Robert De Niro
To be a preacher requires two apparently contradictory qualities: confidence and humility. -- Timothy Radcliffe
Many intelligence reports in war are contradictory; even more are false, and most are uncertain. -- Carl von Clausewitz
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. -- George Orwell
I am a contradictory mess but I see it as my prerogative to change my mood like the weather. -- Shirley Manson
Why do we pigeonhole and label an artist? It is a sure way of missing the important, the contradictory, the things that make him or her unique. -- Lukas Foss
One might as well try to ride two horses moving in different directions, as to try to maintain in equal force two opposing or contradictory sets of desires. -- Robert Collier
The 'morality of compromise' sounds contradictory. Compromise is usually a sign of weakness, or an admission of defeat. Strong men don't compromise, it is said, and principles should never be compromised. -- Andrew Carnegie
It's about how to bring together the seemingly contradictory aspects of the memorial, which is about a tragedy and how it changed the world, but also about creating a vital and beautiful city of the 21st century. -- Daniel Libeskind
To the indefinite, uncertain mind of the American radical the most contradictory ideas and methods are possible. The result is a sad chaos in the radical movement, a sort of intellectual hash, which has neither taste nor character. -- Emma Goldman
Each building has to be beautiful, but cheap and fast, but it lasts forever. That is already an incredible battery of seemingly contradictory demands. So yes, I'm definitely perhaps contradictory person, but I operate in very contradictory times. -- Rem Koolhaas
My mind withdrew its thoughts from experience, extracting itself from the contradictory throng of sensuous images, that it might find out what that light was wherein it was bathed... And thus, with the flash of one hurried glance, it attained to the vision of That Which Is. -- Saint Augustine
It is clear to me that people often want incompatible things. They want danger and excitement on the one hand, and safety and security on the other, and often simultaneously. Contradictory desires mean that life can never be wholly satisfying or without frustration. -- Theodore Dalrymple
Emotion is messy, contradictory... and true. -- Nigella Lawson
Contradictory strands create an essay that's richly ambivalent. -- Phillip Lopate
To understand Mozart's contradictory qualities would indeed be to understand genius. -- Lukas Foss
Contradictory as it seems, malnutrition is a key contributor to obesity. -- Madeleine M. Kunin
It's quite hard for people to just accept that they're very contradictory. -- Kenneth Branagh
Every novelist has a different purpose-and often several purposes which might even be contradictory. -- Irwin Shaw
It is not possible to live in this age if you don't have a sense of many contradictory forces. -- Rem Koolhaas
As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life. -- Charles Baudelaire
Revolution is not the uprising against preexisting order, but the setting up of a new order contradictory to the traditional one -- Jose Ortega y Gasset
Disney made a fortune out of inventing the businessman's idea of the imaginary as the contradictory of the businessman's idea of the real. -- David Antin
You may find many contradictory statements and philosophies within my writings. However, to this I will say such is life, for life is full of contradictions. -- Bryant H. McGill
Some people suggest that the problem is the separation of powers. If you had a parliamentary system, the struggle for power would not result in such complex peace treaties that empower so many different people to pursue so many contradictory aims -- James Q. Wilson
The morality of compromise' sounds contradictory. Compromise is usually a sign of weakness, or an admission of defeat. Strong men don't compromise, it is said, and principles should never be compromised. I shall argue that strong men, conversely, know when to compromise and that all principles can be compromised to serve a greater principle. -- Charles Handy
Reality is contradictory. And it's paradoxical. -- Tom Robbins
In a typically contradictory move, globalisation, while promoting economic integration among elites, has exacerbated sectarianism everywhere else. -- Pankaj Mishra
I believe that an art exhibition can be engaging, fun and deeply intellectually satisfying and serious. These are not contradictory concepts in art. -- Jeffrey Deitch
Fusion food as a concept is kind of trying to quite consciously fuse things that are sometimes quite contradictory, sometimes quite far apart, to see if they'd work. -- Yotam Ottolenghi
All people are paradoxical. No one is easily reducible, so I like characters who have contradictory impulses or shades of ambiguity. It's fun, and it's fun because it's hard. -- Edward Norton
Artists are not cheerleaders, and we're not the heads of tourism boards. We expose and discuss what is problematic, what is contradictory, what is hurtful and what is silenced in the culture we're in. -- Junot Diaz
It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically considered, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as society and the individual are mutually exclusive. -- Thomas Mann
Some people suggest that the problem is the separation of powers. If you had a parliamentary system, the struggle for power would not result in such complex peace treaties that empower so many different people to pursue so many contradictory aims. -- James Q. Wilson
Beliefs about how lying looks are plentiful and often contradictory: depending on whom you choose to believe, liars can be detected because they fidget a lot, hold very still, cross their legs, cross their arms, look up, look down, make eye contact or fail to make eye contact. -- Robin Marantz Henig
Religion is a complex and often contradictory force in our world. It fosters hope and comfort but also doubt and guilt. It creates both community and exclusion. It brings societies together around shared belief and tears them apart through war. However, what unites the faithful, whatever their religion, is the unshakeable force of generosity. -- Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen
Reality is very, very contradictory, and so I try to write just perfecting what I see, what I read, what I feel, in a feel-thinking way. Not only giving ideas, or receiving ideas, or trying to explain something, but mainly feel-thinking, a feel-thinking language able to tie the heart and the mind, which have been divorced. -- Eduardo Galeano
Art has a way of confronting us, of reminding us, of engaging us, in what it means to be human, and what it means to be human is to be flawed, is to be contradictory, is to be often weak, and yet despite all of these what we would consider drawbacks, that we're also quite beautiful. Spin is the opposite. -- Junot Diaz
There are contradictory tendencies in American society. There's a huge range of activities that one can engage in that mark it as a quite free society. It's also true to say that the powers that be have so much control over how people think that there are fewer and fewer people who make use of the rights and information available to them. -- Norman Finkelstein
Everything that is contradictory creates life -- Salvador Dali
The morality of compromise sounds contradictory. -- Andrew Carnegie
Opposites are not contradictory but complementary. -- Niels Bohr
My father was a very contradictory man. -- John Malkovich
[I am a] contradictory and paradoxical man. -- Salvador Dali
Goering was a contradictory [and] complex ... character. -- Richard Overy
Reality and love are almost contradictory for me. -- Julie Delpy
Literature is about being a complex, contradictory human being. -- Julia Alvarez
Son, the phrase is self-contradictory; "sense" is never "common". -- Robert A. Heinlein
Laughter is born out of the discovery of the contradictory. -- Alfred Jarry
History is tangled, messy, contradictory. But is where we are. -- Eamon Duffy
To understand Mozart's contradictory qualities would indeed be to understand genius." -- Lukas Foss
Maybe most people were fundamentally contradictory. The real people at any rate. -- Tom Robbins
If there is no contradictory impression, there is nothing to awaken reflection -- Plato
The ultimate way of Being lies beyond all contradictory pairs of opposites -- Anagarika Govinda
Sometimes our motivations can be quite hazy, contradictory and multi-faceted, in real life. -- Adam Rayner
Consciousness of exclusion through naming is acute. Identities seem contradictory, partial, and strategic. -- Donna J. Haraway
Wandering and confused, lost to myself, ill-assorted, contradictory, Pausing, gazing, bending, and stopping -- Nicholas Sparks
One realizes after a long time that, actually, we are contradictory, all of us. -- Annie Lennox
Barack Obama's campaign of empty self-contradictory promises has apparently hoodwinked the state of Wyoming... -- Charles Foster Johnson
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Logic rests on the axiom that existence exists. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification. -- Ayn Rand
The human soul is hospitable, and will entertain conflicting sentiments and contradictory opinions with much impartiality. -- George Eliot
Those [scientists] who dislike entertaining contradictory thoughts are unlikely to enrich their science with new ideas. -- Max Planck
I think people have the capacity to be many different things and many seemingly contradictory behaviors. -- Richard Ayoade
You have to systematically create confusion, it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life -- Salvador Dali
I realize I am contradictory: I have an independent filmmaker's sensibility and a Hollywood director's short-attention span. -- Doug Liman
The contradictory remarks of politicians are forgotten; the more asinine predictions of pundits are buried with mercy. -- Norman Mailer
Caution! Be very careful of false, meaningless, self-contradictory, and not even very funny warnings, like this one. -- Ashleigh Brilliant
It is not that I love contradictions: life is contradictory. Existence itself is possible only through contradictions. -- Rajneesh
Since war itself is the most extreme form of terrorism, a war on terrorism is profoundly self-contradictory. -- Howard Zinn
People are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each. -- Alan Lightman
I'm a huge fan of basically anything written about complicated, contradictory women. I'm drawn to them really quickly. -- Phoebe Waller-Bridge
The creative person pays close attention to what appears discordant and contradictory... and is challenged by such irregularities. -- Frank X. Barron
I have found human nature a bit contradictory in my living of it. Human life is incredibly strange. -- Pat Conroy
Art and activism can be symbiotic. They don't have to be, of course; they can also be contradictory. -- Bill Ayers
Matter is a term contrary to soul. But nonsoul is its contradictory. Whatever is not soul is nonsoul. -- Virchand Gandhi
The form most contradictory to human life that can appear among the human species is the "self-sat-isfied man. -- Jose Ortega y Gasset
The mark of the developed intellect is that it could accommodate two contradictory ideas at the same time. -- John Kao
To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape. -- John Fowles
Your desires will very often be contradictory and so will your strengths. All of our contradictions make us whole. -- Danielle LaPorte
In the eyes of the ego, self-esteem and humility are contradictory. In truth, they are one and the same. -- Eckhart Tolle
Any belief in miracles is flat contradictory not just to the facts of science but to the spirit of science. -- Richard Dawkins
Trouble comes not because we have taken any wrong step but because we are in a complex and contradictory world. -- T. B. Joshua
No school can supply an anti-liberal education, or a fascist education, as these terms are contradictory. Liberalism and education are one. -- George Seldes
The desire of privilege and the taste of equality are the dominant and contradictory passions of the French of all times. -- Charles de Gaulle
Of course, if one ignores contradictory observations, one can claim to have an "elegant" or "robust" theory. But it isn't science. -- Halton Arp
I'm a human being who lives a flawed, contradictory life. And I have all sorts of problems and all sorts of successes. -- Jamie Lee Curtis
The nature of love is that it catches you off-guard, subjects you to rules you have never faced, some of them contradictory. -- Ivan Doig
The contradictory, consuming, contested relationship between detail and whole, event an eventuality, breathes fire and wisdom in every great work of art. -- Russell Sherman
Psychologists call it "free-floating" anxiety. What contradictory words. Anxiety doesn't free-float. It stalks. It attacks. It lands on you with a thud. -- Martha Manning
Beautiful, ugly, impressive, disgusting, meaningless, grim, contradictory etc â?¦ It makes no difference, as long as it is life, vigorously pouring forth. -- Asger Jorn
[Identity liberalism] is about recognition and self-definition. It's narcissistic. It's isolating. It looks within. And it also makes two contradictory claims on people. -- Steve Inskeep
To character and success, two things, contradictory as they may seem, must go together... humble dependence on God and manly reliance on self. -- William Wordsworth
On many issues, including on the use of nuclear weapons, it is not clear where [Donald] Trump stands, due to his contradictory statements. -- Donald Trump
We are by far the most contradictory of all primates. An animal with this much internal conflict has never lived on this earth. -- Frans de Waal
A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers. -- Leonard Bernstein
If all creeds are equally true, then since they are contradictory to one another, they are all equally false, or at least equally uncertain. -- John Gresham Machen
I and you-We are infinate, rich, large, contradictory, living, breathing miracles-free human beings, children of God and the everlasting universe. That's what we do. -- Robert Fulghum
Mathematics catalogues everything that is not self-contradictory; within that vast inventory, physics is an island of structures rich enough to contain their own beholders. -- Greg Egan
You don't need the 'voice of God' commentary. Instead, by juxtaposing contradictory or confirmatory witnesses and archive material, your point of view becomes obvious. -- Marcel Ophuls
I had a lot of enthusiasms that were very contradictory, I was never very doctrinaire in the type of design I wanted to do. -- Michael Bierut
Yes, I know liberals are more empirical because Jonathan Chait says they are, but my empirical studies of liberal empiricism keep spitting out contradictory findings. -- Jonah Goldberg
The dream is a series of images, which are apparently contradictory and nonsensical, but arise in reality from psychologic material which yields a clear meaning. -- Carl Jung
Life is so urgent and necessitates living slow. It's only the amateurs-and that I've been, and it's been ugly-who thinks slow and urgent are contradictory. -- Ann Voskamp
The high-heeled shoe is a marvellously contradictory item; it brings a woman to a man's height but makes sure she cannot keep up with him. -- Germaine Greer
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Nothing in all the world is so nonsensical and contradictory, save mortals, that is, who live in the grip of the superstitions of the past. -- Anne Rice
It is beautiful to be alone, it is also beautiful to to be in love, to be with people. And they are complementary, not contradictory. -- Rajneesh
A girl asks her doctor, "Doctor, I've forgotten to take my contradictory pill!" The doctor says: "Are you ignorant?" The girl says: "Yes, three months!" -- Frank Carson
The tolerance of the skeptic"¦ accepts the most diverse and indeed the most contradictory opinions, and keeps all his suspicions for the "dogmatist." -- Jean Guitton
Just as Lincoln got contradictory advice from the extremists of both sides . . . so now I have to guard myself against the extremists of both sides. -- Theodore Roosevelt
Beautiful woman wrapped in chadors, with huge machine guns in their hands. Brilliant, shocking, amazingly contradictory images. They compelled me to deeply investigate these ideas. -- Shirin Neshat
Irony is the bringing together of two contradictory truths and to make out of the contradiction a new truth, with a laugh or a smile. -- Anne Hathaway
In the realm of culture, the new totalitarianism manifests itself precisely in a harmonizing pluralism, where the most contradictory works and truths peacefully coexist in indifference. -- Herbert Marcuse
Trying to keep up with health advice can feel like surfing the Net for weather forecasts: what you find is always changing, often contradictory and rarely encouraging. -- Julian Baggini
You don't have many suspects who are innocent of a crime. That's contradictory. If a person is innocent of a crime, then he is not a suspect. -- Edwin Meese
Poststructuralism. . . . is a form of literary criticism that uses elaborate wordplay to prove its central premise, that all language is internally contradictory and has no fixed meaning. -- Naomi Wolf
Prayer and action...can never be seen as contradictory or mutually exclusive. Prayer without action grows into powerless pietism, and action without prayer degenerates into questionable manipulation. -- Henri Nouwen
Agnosticism is epistemologically self-contradictory on its own assumptions because its claim to make no assertion about ultimate reality rests upon a most comprehensive assertion about ultimate reality. -- Cornelius Van Til

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