#irony

The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#free-inquiry #free-speech #irony #intelligence

Fukuyama’s thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious. It should be remembered, though, that even when Fukuyama advanced it, the idea that history had reached a ‘terminal beach’ was not merely triumphalist. Fukuyama warned that his radiant city would be haunted, but he thought its specters would be Nietzschean rather than Marxian. Some of Nietzsche’s most prescient pages are those in which he describes the ‘oversaturation of an age with history’. ‘It leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself’, he wrote in Untimely Meditations, ‘and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism’, in which ‘cosmopolitan fingering’, a detached spectatorialism, replaces engagement and involvement. This is the condition of Nietzsche’s Last Man, who has seen everything, but is decadently enfeebled precisely by this excess of (self) awareness. ↗

— Mark Fisher

#end-of-history #fukuyama #history #irony #last-man

The worst mistake a writer can make is to assume everyone has an imagination. ↗

— Andrew McEwan

#fast-food #humour #irony #laziness #misapprehension

The things I do for love. ↗

— George R.R. Martin

#love

Without an element of vulgarity, no man can be a work of art...I have to try and think what an artist is, apart from a hooligan who cannot live within his income of praise. ↗

— Quentin Crisp

#creativity #humor #irony-of-life #art

Still, waking up this early was just wrong. “Why can’t people be reasonable and only die after eleven A.M.?” I whined. ↗

— Diana Rowland

#death

Look, I know this is the last thing you want to talk about, but I wanted to ask you . . . .” He trailed off, looking strangely uneasy. “Ask me . . . ?” Ask me to dinner? Ask me out for drinks? Ask me if I wanted to see what he looked like under that uniform? Yow, where’d that last one come from? ↗

— Diana Rowland

#death

The American white relegates the black to the rank of shoeshine boy; and he concludes from this that the black is good for nothing but shining shoes. ↗

— George Bernard Shaw

#irony #racial-discrimination #equality

I was much affected by the internal troubles of the Punch family; I thought that with a little more tact on the part of Mrs. Punch and some restraint held over a temper, naturally violent, by Mr. Punch, a great deal of this sad misunderstanding might have been prevented. ↗

— Edmund Gosse

#irony #family

As usual I was working the graveyard shift—an irony I reveled in—at an emergency call center. What other shift would a vampire feel comfortable working? ↗

— Patois

#graveyard-shift #irony #vampire #food