Contradicting People Quotes

“God is angry with man. Unless we believe and repent we shall all be damned. It is impossible, indeed, for its advocates even to say this without instantly contradicting themselves. Their doctrine frightens them. They explain in various ways that a great many people will be saved without believing, and that eternal damnation is not eternal nor damnation.”

— Leslie Stephen

“The necessity of political struggle especially means confronting and contradicting those on the left who say that resistance is futile. Such people have no place in a movement for justice. For actionists who choose to work aboveground, this confrontation with detractors - and some of these detractors reject the idea of resistance of any kind - is one of the small, constant actions you can take. Defend the possibility of resistance, insist on a moral imperative of fighting for this planet, and argue for direct action against perpetrators. Despite what much of the left has now embraced, we are not all equally responsible. There are a few corporations that have turned the planet into a dead commodity for their private wealth, destroying human cultures along with it.”

— Lierre Keith

“We're always contradicting ourselves.
We want people to tell us apart ...
... yet we don't want them to be able to.
We want people to get to know us ...
... but we also want them to keep their distance.
We've always longed for someone to accept us ...
But we never believed there'd be anyone who would accept our twisted ways.
That's why we'll stay locked up tight ...
... in our own little private world ...
... and throw away the key, so that no one can ever hurt us.”

— Bisco Hatori

“Humans generally get out the gist of what they need to say right at the beginning, then spend forever qualifying, contradicting, burnishing or taking important things back. Yor rareley miss anything by cutting most people off after two sentences.”

— Richard Ford

“He had been brought up to it from a boy, his father, as I have heard, accustoming his children to dispute with one another for his diversion, while sitting at the table after dinner, but I think the practice was not wise; for, in the course of my observation, these disputing, contradicting, and confuting people are generally unfortunate in their affairs. They get victory sometimes, but they never get good will, which would be of more use to them.”

— Benjamin Franklin

“Think of mental energy as broadcasting on a certain wavelength," he tried to explain. "People with powers of the mind can tap into that wavelength ... "
"That's all fine and good," I nodded, "but evidently my transmitter is broken. Or much more likely ... I never had one in the first place."
"Ah, yes," he nodded unenthusiastically, "and your nose is mounted upside-down."
"Excuse me?" My forehead creased.
"I do wish you would quit contradicting me," he let out a tired sigh. "It's insulting ... and highly annoying.”

— M.A. George

“What again could this astonishing thing be like which people were so anxious to contradict, that in doing so they did not mind contradicting themselves?”

— G.K. Chesterton

“Virtue is under certain circumstances merely an honorable form of stupidity: who could be ill-disposed toward it on that account? And this kind of virtue has not been outlived even today. A kind of sturdy peasant simplicity, which, however, is possible in all classes and can be encountered only with respect and a smile, believes even today that everything is in good hands, namely in the "hands of God"; and when it maintains this proportion with the same modest certainty as it would that two and two make four, we others certainly refrain from contradicting. Why disturb THIS pure foolishness? Why darken it with our worries about man, people, goal, future? And even if we wanted to do it, we could not. They project their own honorable stupidity and goodness into the heart of things (the old God, deus myops, still lives among them!); we others - we read something else into the heart of things: our own enigmatic nature, our contradictions, our deeper, more painful, more mistrustful wisdom.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“From the perspective of the consciousness disciplines, our ordinary state of waking consciousness is severely suboptimal. Rather than contradicting the Western paradigm, this perspective simply extends it beyond psychology's dominant concern, at least until very recently, with pathology and with therapies aimed at restoring people to "normal" functioning in the usual waking state of consciousness. At the heart of this "orthogonal," paradigm-breaking perspective lies the conviction that it is essential for a person to engage in a personal, intensive, and systematic training of the mind through the discipline of meditation practice to free himself or herself from the incessant and highly conditioned distortions characteristic of our everyday emotional and thought processes, distortions that, as we have seen, can continually undermine the experiencing of our intrinsic wholeness.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

“Churchgoing is not synonymous with personal spirituality. There are some people who get so busy in church worship and projects that they become insensitive to the pressing human needs that sourround them, contradicting the very precepts they profess to believe deeply.”

— Stephen R. Covey

“Avoid contradicting in general, especially people you love.”

— Maurice Baring

“We were always contradicting ourselves. We wanted to be told apart - We didn't want to be told apart. We wanted people to know us - We didn't want them to know. We were always looking for someone who would finally accept us. But there was no way that would ever happen, not as twisted as we were. We were so afraid of someone breaking through our barrier and hurting us, we kept a strong lock on our hearts to protect ourselves.”

— Kaoru