(104 quotes found)
“It is a paradox that every dictator has climbed to power on the ladder of free speech. Immediately on attaining power each dictator has suppressed all free speech except his own.”
Herbert Hoover
“Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America - that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement”
Thomas Wolfe
“The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.”
Paul Valery
“To be entirely free, and at the same time, entirely dominated by law, is the eternal paradox of human life that we realise at every moment.”
Oscar Wilde
“So much of life is paradox. So much of life is neither one thing nor the other... it's both things at the same time.”
David Hyde Pierce
“All ultimately intermarried to produce a race of many strains, which may account for the paradox that a people famed for stolid, patient, practical common-sense; a nation as Napoleon said, of "shopkeepers", has produced more adventurers, explorers and poets than probably any other in history.”
Arthur Bryant
“We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.”
Bertrand Russell
“It is the paradox of life that the way to miss pleasure is to seek it first. The very first condition of lasting happiness is that a life should be full of purpose, aiming at something outside self.”
Hugo Black
“This is not remarkable, for, as we know, reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events. We seem here to have a paradox: that the reality of an event, which is not real in itself, arises from the other events which, likewise, in themselves are not real. But this only affirms what we must affirm: that direction is all. And only as we realize this do we live, for our own identity is dependent upon this principal.”
Robert Penn Warren
“For thence - a paradox Which comforts while it mocks, - Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail: What I aspired to be, And was not, comforts me: A brute I might have been, but would not sink i' the scale”
Robert Browning
