Top 240 Absurd Quotes

In a way, advertising, for all its shallowness, its love of design, its modishness and its self-justification, is curiously innocent. The idea of the hidden persuader or the manipulator is largely absurd.

I knew for years I wanted to write a novel that addressed the personal trauma of my older sister, who suffered – and still suffers – from mental illness. For a long time I imagined – and I know it’s absurd – that she was an indirect casualty of the Vietnam War.

Dee Dee got the name ‘The Ramones‘ from Paul McCartney. McCartney would call himself Paul Ramon when he checked into hotels and didn’t want to be noticed. I liked it because I thought it was ridiculous. The Ramones? That’s absurd!

The power to regulate the value of money does not involve a power to dilute the value of money by inflation, an absurd and self-serving rendering.

It is as absurd to say that a man can’t love one woman all the time as it is to say that a violinist needs several violins to play the same piece of music.

The argument by the anti-gay-marriage crowd is so absurd, so internally contradictory, and so awash in unproven assertions that it is difficult to take it as anything more than a construct cobbled together by people who just don’t like those people.

If a club is winning, you never pay attention to a guy who’s 0-for-10. If a club is losing, all of a sudden you’ll find that he’s the main reason why you’re losing, which is absurd for me.

I like the absurd and the surreal: the Coen brothers, Bunuel, Kubrick.

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous – to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

Humor is a way of saying we’re all seeing the same ridiculous, absurd, infuriating things together.

Space travel is the only technology that is more dangerous and more expensive now than it was in its first year. Fifty years after Yuri Gagarin, the space shuttle ended up being more dangerous and more expensive to fly than those first throwaway rockets, even though large portions of it were reusable. It’s absurd.

I think novels – or any art form – can have a powerful impact on people’s perceptions of race, particularly if they draw attention to the absurd inconsistencies and stereotypes we all carry around with us and don’t want to think about.

When things are difficult, awful, stressful, the thing that always gets you through is a sense of humour. I don’t mean – well, maybe I do – laugh at the hangman as he puts the noose around your neck. But an eye, an ear, for the ridiculous, the absurd in life, can get you through a lot.

Thus the creation, which seems an arbitrary act, supposes laws as invariable as those of the fatality of the Atheists. It would be absurd to say that the Creator might govern the world without those rules, since without them it could not subsist.

Teachers should not need to have to buy books for the kids, or pencils and pens. That’s absurd.

This is going to sound completely absurd, but I do sometimes feel like the enjoyment of an awards ceremony or the pride in the finished article hasn’t ever surpassed the joy of doing the work, of making it. The doing it is really the bit I’m there for.

Part of being a comedian is that it’s your job to look at life and regurgitate it in a funny way, to point out its absurdities.

I would never, ever trade any campaign donation – that’s absurd – for some type of favor to anyone.

Without sounding negative, I’m not a huge fan of a lot of stand-up. I’m more interested in an absurd kind of theater.

There are many countries where you can only believe more or you can believe less. But in the United States we have this incredible smorgasbord, and it really interests me why people are drawn to one faith rather than another, especially to a system of belief that to an outsider seems absurd or dangerous.

Humor is very interesting to me. My films are not comedies, but there’s comedy in them from time to time, absurdities, just like in real life.

In life, a lot of great ideas sound insane or absurd at first.

I don’t think American family sitcoms are mean. I guess I really love ‘Arrested Development.’ I guess they are quite mean in that, but that is also a very silly, surreal, absurd show as well, and it has got a heart as well.

It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

In the cloud, customers don’t want a six-month contract negotiation; that concept is absurd when you can implement a cloud-based suite from beginning to end in a month or a few months.

To say that I could manipulate one of the men who has shown the most courage before the Cuban government, who gets beaten every day, who did a hunger strike that freed political prisoners… I think that’s absurd.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

I am a person who has many dreams. But as soon as I accomplish one, I move on to the next. That’s my fatal, absurd nature.

And if that’s what the American people want, then that’s what the policy should be, of course. But the idea that anything in the United States is too sensitive to discuss or too dangerous to discuss is really, I think, absurd.

How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.

Lewis Carroll, you see, wasn’t really interested in telling an exciting story. Well, he wasn’t interested in things like cause and effect or a linear narrative. It’s surreal, it’s absurd, it’s wordplay, it’s satirical, it’s analyzing itself, it’s funny, it’s an enormous challenge.

The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment, it is all that links them together.

Well, this is an unfortunate part of the UN institution. It’s the – the theater of the absurd. It doesn’t only cast Israel as the villain; it often casts real villains in leading roles: Gadhafi’s Libya chaired the UN Commission on Human Rights; Saddam‘s Iraq headed the UN Committee on Disarmament.

I was once part of a Christmas cabaret. I sang ‘I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.’ I tap-danced. I had a ten-gallon hat. It was quite absurd.

My first feeling about the paper and the attitude is that it is absurd.

Of course, it’s absurd that we trust the Tories with our day-to-day reality, as so many of them don’t really inhabit it. Why elect people to run our schools and hospitals who choose not to go to those schools and hospitals?

The idea of personal salvation is intensely repugnant to me when it is not absurd. Imagine Roosevelt, the big brute, preserving his personality in a future state and swaggering about as a celestial Rough Rider!

You know, I always was an early morning or late night writer. Early morning was my favorite; late night was because you had a deadline. And at four in the morning you make up some of your most absurd jokes.

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.

What’s the point of our life? Everything seems absurd until we die, and then it makes sense.

I was a serious kid to an absurd degree. I was overwhelmed with responsibility. You know, trying to play grown up. I overdid it.

I’m the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime.

Refusal to believe until proof is given is a rational position; denial of all outside of our own limited experience is absurd.

Expectations that black directors have to make black films about black subject matter are, to me, kind of absurd.

It would be absurd for me to diagnose Sarah Palin with a sprained ankle, let alone any sort of mental illness.

Rush Limbaugh’s pathetic abuse of logic, his absurd pomposity, his relentless self-promotion, his ridiculous ego – now those, friends, are appropriate targets for satire.

Evolution is among the most well-established theories in the scientific community. To doubt it sounds to biologists as absurd as denying relativity does to physicists.

What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.

The world generally speaking is now drifting on a more and more devastating course towards the absurd target of extermination – or rather, to be more exact – of the northern hemisphere‘s towns, fields, and the people who have developed our civilization.

This is the great crisis in football now. It’s not just Rangers; it’s a lot of clubs. Big clubs always create more debt despite the huge income they have. It’s almost an achievement, isn’t it? They make so much money, and yet, still, their debts rise and rise and rise. How does that happen? It’s absurd.

China invaded Tibet. It invaded it. So all this nonsense about them being the same country is absurd. It’s called Tibet. If it was part of China, it would be called China, wouldn’t it?

I don’t know. I think it’s funny! I think it’s funny! I go, what? It’s so absurd. I’m alone.

It is absolutely absurd that someone who is deemed unsafe to get on an airplane is allowed to buy a gun in America. It’s truly absurd.

I became intrigued with colour theory. The absurd pronouncements of the Colour Institute, a group that decides what colours are hot each year or season, amused me.

I like when things are completely absurd. I like when people take risks. I want to be able to challenge myself and challenge the viewer and challenge the back of our mind – the subconscious mind.

I’ll never understand why people somehow support pollution. It’s completely irrational, and I don’t get it. Somewhere along the line, they bought into this fiction that one has to choose between the environment and business, which is just a complete falsehood and absurd.

I was lucky enough to be able to do comedies, dramas, completely different parts. At the beginning, when you start you have a fantasy that you could be somebody else. Which is absurd. That’s part of being an actor. It’s your voice, it’s the way you move, it’s your body, even if you transform it, you play with it.

I find it hard to take rock groups very seriously or treat them with respect. There is something absurd about these gloomy young men getting together and banging away.

It is human nature to think wisely and act in an absurd fashion.

Of course, politicians always say they’re just describing their opponents‘ positions, even if they are in fact offering absurd caricatures, if not outright lies.

Libraries keep the records on behalf of all humanity. the unique and the absurd, the wise and the fragments of stupidity.

If a song is funny and absurd, and it sounds great, it’s just going to be that much funnier. And there’s no better example of that than ‘Monty Python.’

Our nation marches closer to Trumpism each day, a path paved with reckless Tweets and the normalization of the ugly and the absurd.

Whenever I’m on my way to a premiere or something, I always have a good laugh in the car… because it’s all so absurd – I’m one generation removed from starvation.

About half the scripts sent to me feature characters I just can’t identify with, particularly one-dimensional businessmen or, if it’s a comedy, some absurd 10-year-old Japanese stereotype, some role related to IT or business… There’s no point in getting mad about it; it’s just the way things are.

The essence of the show is that SpongeBob is an innocent in a world of jaded characters. The rest is absurd packaging.

The defeat of Obamacare will come from the realization that the very idea of a government-administered health care system is absurd… and by people opting out of the system and developing workarounds.

It’s absolutely absurd to even consider voting on Sunday alcohol sales. I am opposed to alcohol period. It doesn’t do anybody any good in the long run. It’s a dangerous drug.

I have this absurd syndrome where I get these out-of-the-blue, pathetic panic attacks. It’ll be in a very easy, simple scene when everything is going swimmingly, and then suddenly, bang, I’m shvitzing and can’t remember my lines.

People can see that we are part of a tradition of absurd comedy, stretching from Spike Milligan and Peter Cook through to Monty Python and Vic Reeves. We’re not like Ricky Gervais’s hyper-real cringe comedy. We’re at the other end of the scale, but there’s room for the sillier stuff, too.

Any criticism of Thatcher throws a dangerously absurd light on the entire machinery of British politics. Thatcher’s name must be protected, not because of all the wrong that she had done, but because the people around her allowed her to do it.

I have this absurd feeling that I can win every game with any team.

Think of Donald Trump’s personal qualities, the bullying, the greed, the showing off, the misogyny, the absurd third-grade theatrics. We have long referred to him as ‘The Donald.’ He is the only person in America to whom we have added an article before his name. It wasn’t because he had attributes we admired.

There obviously are a hell of a lot of people that love Lady Gaga. But to me, she’s been the theatre of the absurd. And the more absurd it is, the bigger she got.

There is nothing so absurd that some philosopher has not already said it.

Life is tragic and absurd, and none of it has any purpose at all.

Sometimes I say to myself, what are you doing in this absurd job? Why don’t you go to Africa and help people? But I cannot help people, because I am a hypochondriac.

I’m a very observational type of comedian that points out everyday absurdities.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

While I oppose the death penalty as a policy matter, in a legal culture in which we reserve the right to execute people for relatively routine street crimes, it seems quite absurd for the justice system to get squeamish about executing the operational masterminds of Sept. 11.

Life is full of ironies and absurdities.

I used to write chronologically when I started, from beginning to end. Eventually I went, ‘That’s absurd; my heart is in this one scene, therefore I must follow it.’

The government, for example, has determined that black people (somehow) have fewer abilities than white people, and, so, must be given certain preferences. Anyone acquainted with both black and white people knows this assessment is not only absurd but monstrous. And yet it is the law.

I don’t personally follow trends; I don’t even like the idea of trends. I think it’s kind of absurd that you have to change every six months, so I always try and buy things that hopefully I’ll like forever, and resonate with me.

It was an absurd theory that by cutting taxes you would increase government revenues, because the growth of the economy would create an overflow of taxes that would fall into the government coffers.

I feel like what I’m after is not easy for me to find, and to want it to be easy… it would be absurd for me to have that ambition.

My point was very simple, and it was that it is absolutely absurd for the United States of America to continue to urge us further down the line towards a federal superstate when the U.S. has not even signed up to the U.N. Convention on Human Rights.

Maturity is often more absurd than youth and very frequently is most unjust to youth.

We have never observed infinity in nature. Whenever you have infinities in a theory, that’s where the theory fails as a description of nature. And if space was born in the Big Bang, yet is infinite now, we are forced to believe that it’s instantaneously, infinitely big. It seems absurd.

I think good comedy is a commitment to the absurd in that the situation for the actors should be virtually played like a drama.

Why on earth would free people remain prisoners in a cage of absurd laws and regulation, with rigid constraints that humiliate the true needs of the people and their country?

Trump’s characterization of undocumented immigrants is, of course, absurd. Not only do the facts, well, trump his assertions, but his prejudiced views demonstrate a deep ignorance about Mexican immigrants in the United States.

It’s an unbelievable, absurd paradox that we have to put one step in front of the other every day without knowing which one will be our last.

I think something about high school students being snobby about how much they have or don’t have is particularly absurd because it’s not theirs. It’s their parents‘. So to feel quite good about yourself because you’ve got the fancy house and car doesn’t make any sense – you didn’t earn any of that.

I have too much respect for the idea of God to make it responsible for such an absurd world.

I would think a sense of the absurd is more important for a political cartoonist, because that could define things like a sense of hypocrisy or a sense of the things one has to be skeptical about.

We all remember the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the worst oil spill in U.S. history. What is less well known is that BP is claiming a 9.9 billion tax deduction on the money they had to spend cleaning up their own mess and paying for damages they caused. That is absurd.

Einstein was a great advocate of the notion that good ideas look absurd at the beginning. Camus expressed a similar view.

It’s absurd to talk about paintings that you haven‘t finished.

All theatre is absurd.

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

It is absurd to look for perfection.

I draw from the Absurd three consequences: my revolt, my liberty, my passion.

Of course, the idea that a robot can have a sexual identity is kind of an absurd one.

So the actual privilege is that you can then take time off – and if you don’t, you’re a fool. You’re earning all this money to support children whom you then don’t see, which is absurd.

The constraints of melodrama can be a great blessing, because they demand that all the characters involved – as absurd and extreme as they may initially seem – must stay utterly rooted in their own reality, or the whole project collapses.

A lot of the stuff that I want to create personally is usually pretty absurd or silly comedy stuff.

God knows the times I have found myself in absurd situations.

The way I eat in my day-to-day life is, like, very simple to the point of being absurd. Like, my boyfriend makes fun of me because if I’m eating a snack, it’s often, like, a pickle and then a hard-boiled egg and then crackers and then maybe a carrot, and it’s like I’m eating like a baby.

You’ve just got to focus on excellence and try not to be distracted by the news and the rumors and the absurdities of the stories that were coming out.

Whatsoever is contrary to nature is contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd.

I’m not a fan of Dr. Seuss’s better-known work, but his fables leave me awe-struck. ‘Ten Tall Tales‘ is a collection of stories where his trademark anarchy is combined with a tautness of writing that shines an affectionate yet uncompromising spotlight on some of the absurdities of human behaviour.

How absurd these critics must seem to me, who in their modern wantonness have become so ingenious. They want to interpret my Tannhauser as specifically Christian and impute to him a tendency to impotent glorification!

I just heard a very funny story about somebody who died yesterday, I’m sorry to say so but it was so absurd that you can’t help laughing. And the person that was concerned about that story was laughing too.

I’ve found I can plunge the characters into whatever absurd, awful situation, and readers will follow as long as the writer makes them seem like ‘real people.’

Simply looking at the status quo and suggesting that the tax code is sacrosanct and can never change, and that decisions made in the ’80s and ’90s can never change, is absurd.

If Franschhoek has a fault, it is in the lavish refurbishment of wine farms and estates which has reached absurd proportions. Some, like Graf Delaire Estate, are brand new, with jewellery shops, indoor streams, and very high-end lodges for rent at prices not many South Africans can afford.

Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible. I think it’s in my basement… let me go upstairs and check.

But we live in a modern world, you know, and, and also it does seem to me that if you – that whatever talents you have, it… I mean it may sound a bit absurd but I, I think it’s your, absolutely your duty to resolve them, you know?

The main thing I don’t like about myself is an absurd level of self-consciousness that makes any sort of social encounter an ordeal for me.

Nothing can be more absurd than the practice that prevails in our country of men and women not following the same pursuits with all their strengths and with one mind, for thus, the state instead of being whole is reduced to half.

Hollywood comedy has gotten really silly and absurd, and I like that.

Any claim that our fighting forces are not reaching their maximum potential because females are not included is absurd.

Poor human reason, when it trusts in itself, substitutes the strangest absurdities for the highest divine concepts.

Jean Piaget observed that scarcely any question seems absurd to a child, but he was silent on the question of absurd answers from adults.

Absurdity is what I like most in life, and there’s humor in struggling in ignorance. If you saw a man repeatedly running into a wall until he was a bloody pulp, after a while it would make you laugh because it becomes absurd.

Saying that fights in Japan were fixed and that me, along with other guys like Silva, Minotauro, etc., did not win those fights legitimately is an ultimate and absurd nonsense.

The conceptual artist Ai WeiWei illustrates the schizoid society that rapid change has produced – sometimes by reassembling Ming-style furniture into absurd and useless arrangements, or by carefully painting and antiquing a Coca-Cola logo on an ancient Chinese pot.

It is not in the world of ideas that life is lived. Life is lived for better or worse in life, and to a man in life, his life can be no more absurd than it can be the opposite of absurd, whatever that opposite may be.

If, indeed, a firearm were more dangerous to its possessors than to potential aggressors, would it not make sense for the government to arm all criminals, and let them accidentally shoot themselves? Is this absurd? Yes, and yet the government, of course, is arming criminals.

I know it sounds absurd, but 11 months old, I did my first commercial.

It’s quite absurd to act against a smoke creature that is not there.

I love comedy that seems kind of a little bit absurd.

The central ideas of Christianity, an angry God and vicarious atonement, are contrary to every fact in nature, as also to the better aspirations of the human heart; they are, in our present stage of enlightenment, absurd, preposterous, and blasphemous propositions.

I have seen the day, when, if a man made himself ridiculous, the world would laugh at him. But now, everything that is mean, disgusting, and absurd, pleases them but so much the better!

I always feel kind of absurd and presumptuous presenting a speech.

Whether you’re gay or straight, with a physical disability, your skin‘s a different color, it’s absurd in this age to not be aware and be concerned of the inequity in rights.

In order to attain the impossible, one must attempt the absurd.

The origin of the absurd idea of immortal life is easy to discover; it is kept alive by hope and fear, by childish faith, and by cowardice.

I think one of the gorgeous things about TG is that we will go from something amazingly serious and important and significant in terms of the world and life, and then do something ludicrous and absurd.

I think it’s absolutely absurd that we’re playing on turf, and it’s really a slap in the face to women’s football by FIFA and just a show of disrespect.

I always think it’s absurd when people go, ‘How can you have a show about Batman without Batman?’ ‘Gotham’ is plenty fascinating, ‘Chinatown‘ style.

Life may be not only meaningless but absurd.

It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.

I spent a lot of time in college studying theater of the absurd and Beckett and Genet, and then I spent a lot of time after that at ‘Gossip Girl‘ auditions, thinking, ‘Wow, I really wasted my money.’

To be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd.

I was exposed to a mix of cultures, lots of different religions and beliefs. I was a spiritual kid and went to Indian powwows and Buddhist temples. But over a period of time, with reading and thinking, I started to feel it was all so absurd: The whole idea of life after death is ridiculous.

I think we get stuck in routines so easily that when an absurd moment in life seems to be there for no reason, it wakes you up out of your everyday pattern. You pull back and look at life a little bit wider because of that one weird thing you weren’t expecting.

I like going absurd pretty quickly. You don’t waste any time when you’re doing theater of the ridiculous.

I believe in God, which means I am open to some absurd possibilities. But I understand the power of that faith, and I understand the metaphor of that belief.

Sometimes people hide behind a kind of naturalistic milieu. But life is full of the most sharp, abrupt changes of tone, from the tragic to the absurd.

When one has been married over thirty years, of course it would be absurd not to admit there have been some difficulties, at some times. But the important thing is that we have weathered them.

Nobody in France would ever say ‘He’s a Jewish novelist‘ or ‘She’s a black novelist,’ even though people do write about those subjects. It would look absurd to a French person to go into a bookstore and see a ‘Gay Studies‘ section.

The idea that motherhood is inherently somehow a threat to creativity is just absurd.

I like being absurd. Being silly.

To a straight man, the notion of walking around as a coiffed, waxed, nail-polish-wearing, lispy dude is uproariously absurd. As people, we find absurdities funny. That’s our first step in making sense of them.

We were saving, saving, saving then going to France and blowing the money eating. She was a nurse and had never experienced fine dining but she loved it, too. Our mates thought it absurd.

It’s absurd to think of ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ this classic, beloved book, beset with a zombie uprising. The goal is to make you suspend your disbelief enough to allow you to get lost in the story and believe what you’re reading for a while.

I thought it completely absurd to mention my name in the same breath as the presidency.

‘Last House’ offended a lot of people. The results in the theaters, even in Boston, reminded me a bit of things from when I was studying Theater of the Absurd, and the rise and the appearance of Ionesco plays, and things like that.

I’ve seen so many women in my family, so many mothers, that have lost children in the war in such absurd ways. I wonder how they do it. How do they keep living? How do they keep smiling?

I think life without spirit is in the dark, it is absurd.

Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic.

Should the Moody Blues be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? That’s absurd. Of course they should be.

It’s an absurd world – you know, billionaires in Birkenstocks. But I’d rather have nerdy tech guys as the next Carnegie than oil tycoons.

Getting the police involved or levying an absurd punishment just because that’s what some zero-tolerance rule mandates – even though it’s clear that the student in question wasn’t a danger – doesn’t make anyone safer. Worse, it can actually cause harm.

The only thing that I’ve really noticed in my own experience is just people kind of saying that a woman, when they react to something exciting, ‘Oh, that’s a masculine way of reacting.’ And to me, that’s absurd. It’s like, that’s how humans – they get excited, and you yell, and you jump, and you flex. That’s what you do.

The Chinese, the African, and the European – they are all there. So the division of the Caribbean experience into being emphatically only African is absurd.

I think the War on Terror is really absurd, especially coming from a country that is founded on terrorism.

Look, at the same time that I don’t want to be a celebrity, I understand that when you make movies you put yourself out in the public eye. I’d be a baby and a fool to be like, ‘Why are there cameras taking pictures of me?’ when I’m on a billboard for a movie. I think that’s a very absurd concept.

Is it absurd to imagine that our social behavior, from amoeba to man, is also planned and dictated, from stored information, by the cells? And that the time has come for men to be entrusted with the task, through heroic efforts, of bringing life to other worlds?

We had a show called NXT, and Daniel Bryan was my rookie, and I was his pro. And the object was for the pros teach the rookies what it’s like to be a WWE Superstar. As soon as that hit the Internet, the Internet thought it was absurd: ‘How dare WWE put Daniel Bryan as Miz’s rookie? Daniel Bryan should be the pro.’

You oughtn’t to yield to temptation. Well, somebody must, or the thing becomes absurd.

I remember when the idea of living to be 40 seemed absurd.

The philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday has become the wisdom of tomorrow.

Airport security is a particular bugbear. At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man, while I can see that averting terrorism is manifestly important, the measures taken seem, simultaneously, absurd.

I feel completely at home in the absurdities of India.

I think somehow you need to get to a certain point in your life where the notion of failure is absurd.

We want to pigeonhole things and people, but it is absurd to regard me just as a furry wig-and-britches actor.

It even feels absurd to be writing or singing a song at all – in the context of actual death, being alive feels absurd.

The history of thought may be summed up in these words: it is absurd by what it seeks and great by what it finds.

My husband does so many romantic things for me, it’s absurd.

In the absurd idiocy of identity regressive politics, looting is seen as protest, and protecting one’s own property is seen as privilege.

I would want the British reader to feel that religion in America isn’t an absurd thing – a sign of a pin head athwart a gigantic body.

I’ve known for years that the university underserved the community, because we assumed that university education is for 18- to 22-year-olds, which is a proposition that’s so absurd it is absolutely mind-boggling that anyone ever conceptualized it. Why wouldn’t you take university courses throughout your entire life?

I couldn’t possibly have any regrets, because I’ve been very lucky, I’ve been celebrated, and I’ve survived. I couldn’t have one single regret. That would be absurd.

Advice in old age is foolish; for what can be more absurd than to increase our provisions for the road the nearer we approach to our journey‘s end.

It’s become uncool to play other people’s songs, and that’s absurd. It has got to change. It’s the reason why everything’s so mediocre.

A sense of humor keen enough to show a man his own absurdities will keep him from the commission of all sins, or nearly all, save those worth committing.

Like everyone else, I grew up loving the Anne books, but L.M. Montgomery is so much more. Like Jane Austen, she has an eye for the absurd and a gift for the ‘mot juste.’

In the world of ‘Tim and Eric,’ everything is big and ridiculous and absurd.

Rock ‘n’ roll is ridiculous. It’s absurd. In the past, U2 was trying to duck that. Now we’re wrapping our arms around it and giving it a great big kiss.

The most absurd and reckless aspirations have sometimes led to extraordinary success.

Humanity should question itself, once more, about the absurd and always unfair phenomenon of war, on whose stage of death and pain only remain standing the negotiating table that could and should have prevented it.

My turn of mind is so given to taking things in the absurd point of view, that it breaks out in spite of me every now and then.

There’s so much absurdity. Poverty is so absurd.

Figuring out what made ‘American Psycho’ tick, it was such a fun script to work on, especially when we got an audience. Everything about it was so dark and yet ABSURD. I played Evelyn, and balancing what made her real and ridiculous was incredibly rewarding.

When I was starting out, doing guest spots on TV, and even commercials, I would go in with a whole crazy wardrobe and some terrible accent. Obviously, I was doing too much. If you bring too much flavor to it, it’s absurd. There’s something to just being spontaneous.

I came to feel very, very sentimental about those sets, which is ludicrous, because they represent everything which is transitory and insubstantial. It’s absurd that one should feel sentimental about timber and canvas.

As a little kid when I would watch ‘Monty Python’… that would just blow me away because it was just so silly and absurd, but so intelligent, and I loved that.

I am a person who has many dreams. But as soon as I accomplish one, I move on to the next. That’s my fatal, absurd nature. Human beings are slaves to our dreams, and I am, too. Now I think I just want to share my musical proposal in its entire form.

I became a Communist by studying capitalist political economy, and when I had some understanding of that problem, it actually seemed to me so absurd, so irrational, so inhuman, that I simply began to elaborate on my own formulas for production and distribution.

Ive lived in London all my life. There are some parts of London where a high percentage of people are on the bottom level of incomes. Treating such people as privileged is absurd and insulting.

Dance looks absurd on film, I think, like little puppets moving around.

I got to play with ZZ Top and introduce Bryan Adams and George Michael. And to have it all topped off by me winning ‘American Idol?!’ It’s pretty absurd.

It’s come to the point where you have people saying it’s our Christian duty to embrace the homosexual movement. This is absurd.

I started moving towards Serbia when I felt my country, Yugoslavia, was being taken away from me. My feeling of nationality was not as strong as those around me who were attaching themselves to these absurd new entities.

Stand at the base and look up at 3,000 feet of blankness. It just looks like there’s no way you can climb it. That’s what you seek as a climber. You want to find something that looks absurd and figure out how to do it.

In ‘John Henry Days,’ I was taking my idea of junketeering and sort of blowing it up to absurd extremes.

The whole concept of the travel agent is absurd. They appear to be agents of the traveller but are actually agents of the airlines.

People love Jane Austen, even though those books are absurd to us, because we like the clarity of it: we can see very clearly what Elizabeth Bennett has to overcome, what she has to deal with.

I used to take someone with me for the chemotherapy so I could do jokes. You always try and find something absurd.

Koreans love to dance; they love to sing. If you actually know Koreans, you see how absurd the stereotype of the ‘Asian robot’ is. They love to laugh – they’re very affectionate. Maybe because of their history of oppression, when they feel you are part of their tribe, they are intensely loyal. I love that about Koreans!

The manufacture of desire isn’t at the heart – if it isn’t absurd to speak of a heart – of the media torrent. Chronic dissatisfaction is at the heart of the matter.

Obviously Madonna reinforces everything absurd and offensive.

Koreans are worried about the Japanese right-wing people, who tend to be against foreigners. But the Koreans in Japan aren’t even foreigners. They are essentially culturally Japanese. If a family has lived in Japan for three generations, it’s absurd to see them as foreigners.

When we examine the opinions of men, we find that nothing is more uncommon than common sense; or, in other words, they lack judgment to discover plain truths or to reject absurdities and palpable contradictions.

There is a lot going on with negotiations in the football business, and I appreciate some people think that it’s a crazy, absurd amount of money.

For many Americans, Osama bin Laden is the paradigmatic Muslim, an absurd conviction for anyone who has lived with Muslims.

I think the media loves taking the most absurd clips for a sport that has become congressional politics.

Most of the basic truths of life sound absurd at first hearing.

Look at ‘Batman’ – that was theater of the absurd, as is ‘Family Guy.’

On Being John Malkovich and the cinema of the absurd, I do enjoy it. I wish there were more like it. The very fact that there can’t be more like it is one of the reasons it’s admirable.

You love all your characters, even the ridiculous ones. You have to on some level; they’re your weird creations in some kind of way. I don’t even know how you approach the process of conceiving the characters if in a sense you hated them. It’s just absurd.

It is absurd to suggest a president whose party controls the Senate should jointly decline to fill a vacant Supreme Court seat – ever.

I don’t think there’s just one person for everyone. It would be very hard for me to be with a guy who was not bright or funny. And he’d have to see the absurdities of the world, not exactly as I see them necessarily.

In politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution.

I am amazed about how everyone wants to know about my love life. They whisper to me, ‘Tell me the truth? Is it true?’ Who cares? Because we have this job, we are to say to everybody what we do, or with whom we sleep? It’s a bit absurd, but that’s why everybody lies so much.

The entrance into Jerusalem has all the elements of the theatre of the absurd: the poor king; truth comes riding on a donkey; symbolic actions – even parading without a permit!

I would hardly say that I have a rich knowledge of anything in particular, but I do seem to be burdened with an unseemly appetite for intellectual and artistic erudition, which, for the sake of balance, I keep well harnessed to a reliable sense of the absurd.

A monomaniac is a sick person whose mentality is perfectly healthy in all respects but one; he has a single flaw, clearly localized. At times, for example, he has an unreasonable and absurd desire to drink or steal or use abusive language; but all his other acts and all his other thoughts are strictly correct.

It is hard to see taxing plastic bags as one of the great issues of our time that merits the foremost place in our finest statesmen‘s minds. It is an absurd little issue, a picayune proportion of household waste, and a pointless inconvenience in people’s lives.

I’ve turned arrogance into an artform, where it’s so absurd that it becomes comedy. But I’ve never done anything to hurt anybody or steal from anyone.

I realized at one point that David and I had not made a record together in almost 26 years and I thought that that was absurd because, first of all it had gone so fast, I didn’t really realize, neither did David, that it had been that long.

Treating your audience like thieves is absurd. Anyone who chooses to listen to our music becomes a collaborator.

It is as absurd to argue men, as to torture them, into believing.

It’s absurd that you know more about your car than you know about your body.

Only she who attempts the absurd can achieve the impossible.

No other show was as absurd as ‘Crackerjack’. It had Stu Francis, who was the first person I saw on TV telling jokes for kids, and then there were the Krankies, who were a comedy duo with a middle-aged woman dressed as a schoolboy doing sketches.

I couldn’t imagine ‘True Grit‘ in 3D. I think the idea is sort of absurd.