#contradiction

I like being on my own better than I like anything else, but I can't give up love. Maybe it's the tension between longing and aloneness that I need. My own funicular railway, holding in balance the two things most likely to destroy me. ↗

— Jeanette Winterson

#longing #love #solitude #love

I like contradictions. We have never attained the infinite variety and contradictions that exist in nature. Tomorrow I shall contradict myself. That is the one way I have of asserting my liberty, the real liberty one does not find as a member of society. ↗

— Man Ray

#expression #liberty #nature

I will raise up prophets to make conflicting pronouncements that inevitably will be garbled in transcription, resulting in mutually exclusive definitions of orthodoxy from which the open-minded will flee in dismay. ↗

— Sheri S. Tepper

#doctrine #narrow-mindedness #orthodoxy #prophecies #religion

The people heard it, and approved the doctrine, and immediately practiced the contrary. ↗

— Benjamin Franklin

#contradiction #doctrines #paradox #practice #rules

This contradiction lies here: they wish God, and they wish humanity. They persist in connecting two terms which, once separated, can come together again only to destroy each other. ↗

— Mikhail Bakunin

#come #connecting #contradiction #destroy #each

There is surely no contradiction in saying that a certain section of the community may be quite competent to protect the persons and property of the rest, yet quite unfit to direct our opinions, or to superintend our private habits. ↗

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

#community #competent #contradiction #direct #habits

There is no contradiction between effective law enforcement and respect for civil and human rights. Dr. King did not stir us to move for our civil rights to have them taken away in these kinds of fashions. ↗

— Dorothy Height

#between #civil #civil rights #contradiction #did

We don't perceive a contradiction between writing books, making films or producing a television program. These days you can't choose how you want to express yourself anymore. ↗

— Alexander Kluge

#between #books #choose #contradiction #days

If you were offered the chance to live your own life again, would you seize the opportunity? The only real philosophical answer is automatically self-contradictory: 'Only if I did not know that I was doing so.' To go through the entire experience once more would be banal and Sisyphean—even if it did build muscle—whereas to wish to be young again and to have the benefit of one's learned and acquired existence is not at all to wish for a repeat performance, or a Groundhog Day. And the mind ought to, but cannot, set some limits to wish-thinking. All right, same me but with more money, an even sturdier penis, slightly different parents, a briefer latency period… the thing is absurd. I seriously would like to know what it was to be a woman, but like blind Tiresias would also want the option of re-metamorphosing if I wished. How terrible it is that we have so many more desires than opportunities. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#conundrums #desire #groundhog-day #life #money

Song-writing is therapy for me. I'm a very moody person, very difficult to live with. There's a lot going on and a lot of contradictions. My life is always one step away from disaster. ↗

— Gary Numan

#away #contradictions #difficult #disaster #going