Irony dissolves sentiment, but occasionally a sentiment is strong enough to dissolve irony.
Chess - it's a nonmainstream game. And the irony is that when you look at Hollywood, it kept using chess as the symbol of intelligence for its heroes, for its top characters, all the time. So it's from "Casablanca" to "Harry Potter. " You always have chess as a very important element to demonstrate intelligence, while in normal life people think it's just a weird intelligence - like AI.
Most of us start from that position of irony now and what I wanted to do - really felt like I had to do if I was going to write another novel - was move towards something like sincerity.
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.
I've learned not to hide behind a veil of irony - to talk about my work in a more honest way.
A $20 haircut hardly ever lasts longer than a $5 haircut.
Part of the irony of environmentalism is questing for solutions when you know you're part of the problem.
Dangerously well’— what an irony is this: it expresses precisely the doubleness, the paradox, of feeling ‘too well
Speakers find joy in public speaking when they realize that a speech is all about the audience, not the speaker. Most speakers are so caught up in their own concerns and so driven to cover certain points or get a certain message across that they can't be bothered to think in more than a perfunctory way about the audience. And the irony is, of course, that there is no hope of getting your message across if that's all the energy you put into the audience. So let go, and give the moment to the audience.
Irony is a qualification of subjectivity.
The irony is that I use computers every day of my life to do music because I edit all of my music in a computer. But when it comes to doing live processing, I prefer, as a performer with an instrument, not just having the computer as the only thing I have. I really prefer and find it much more flexible to have the limitations of pedals.
It is one of history's great ironies that capitalists built decent and humane societies on the basis of an amoral approach to the economics of pricing, whereas socialists built exploitative and inhumane societies on the basis of a morally inflamed approach to economics.
When I was young I had no means or time, and now I have the means and time, I have no youth.
Irony is based on insecurity; people like to not like things because they don't understand them.
Maybe the desert wisdom of the Dakotas can teach us to love anyway, to love what is dying, in the face of death, and not pretend that things are other than they are. The irony and wonder of all of this is that it is the desert's grimness, its stillness and isolation, that brings us back to love.
To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony.
Don’t underestimate the value of irony—it is extremely valuable.
Adolescence is about digging out the iron inside irony.
Men who retain irony are not to be trusted. They can't always resist an impulse to tickle themselves.
It's one of the ironies of human nature that the most sensitive people are generally insensitive to the feelings of others.