#absurdity

They say that Caliph Omar, when consulted about what had to be done with the library of Alexandria, answered as follows: 'If the books of this library contain matters opposed to the Koran, they are bad and must be burned. If they contain only the doctrine of the Koran, burn them anyway, for they are superfluous.' Our learned men have cited this reasoning as the height of absurdity. However, suppose Gregory the Great was there instead of Omar and the Gospel instead of the Koran. The library would still have been burned, and that might well have been the finest moment in the life of this illustrious pontiff. ↗

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#alexandria #caliph #intolerance #library #men

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

— Benjamin Franklin

#contradiction #doctrines #paradox #practice #rules

An ostentatious man will rather relate a blunder or an absurdity he has committed, than be debarred from talking of his own dear person. ↗

— Joseph Addison

#blunder #committed #dear #debarred #his

I really enjoy playing that everyman part because that part is us, the audience. And you need somebody inside a comedy to tether the absurdity to reality. ↗

— Jason Bateman

#audience #because #comedy #enjoy #everyman

Absurdity, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion. ↗

— Ambrose Bierce

#belief #inconsistent #manifestly #opinion #own

Constantly risking absurdity and death whenever he performs above the heads of his audience, the poet, like an acrobat, climbs on rhyme to a high wire of his own making. ↗

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#absurdity #audience #climbs #constantly #death

Although he was a young and virile man at 37, he was not inexhaustible. In addition to food and drink, he had better lay in a couple thousand tablets of viagra. The drug would probably remain potent if he vacuum packed the pills in groups of 10 and kept them in a freezer. That would work unless civilization completely collapsed and power companies were unable to function. Fortunately, Jim had a propane-powered backup generator with half a dozen tanks of fuel already on hand. If Henry added to the propane supply, and he used the generator only for essential maintenance like keeping the viagra freezer operating in warm weather, he would be happy here on the farm for a looong, looong time. Unless, even now, dead Jim was out there in the generator shed sabotaging the machinery. ↗

— Dean Koontz

#end-of-the-world #male-thinking #paranoia #food

I am confident of my ability to demonstrate that one can sometimes believe in something and yet not believe in it. Nothing is less fathomable than the systems that motivate our actions. ↗

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

#belief #life #life

We all live inside the terrible engine of authority, and it grinds and shrieks and burns so that no one will say: lines on maps are silly. ↗

— Catherynne M. Valente

#authority #life #rules #society #life

I told her that my happy yellow teapot has a kinky backstory involving a nineteenth-century vegetarian sex cult in upstate New York whose members lived for three decades as self-proclaimed "Bible communists" before incorporating into the biggest supplier of dinnerware to the American food-service industry, not to mention harboring their most infamous resident, an irritating young maniac who, years after he moved away, was hanged for assassinating President Garfield. ↗

— Sarah Vowell

#yay-history #food