Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at…

Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand - that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas…

— Annie Dillard

You have to buy off interest groups, compromise your ideals, and settle for half loaves...

— Kevin Drum

But recently it seems that each time I vote, I am being asked to compromise my conservative ideals and my commitment to the American…

— Jeff Miller

You have to be uncompromised in your level of commitment to whatever you are doing, or it can disappear as fast as it appeared...…

— Michael Jordan

Unaware of the absurdity of it, we introduce our own petty household rules into the economy of the universe for which the life of…

— Alexander Herzen

I've always felt that comedy doesn't just come from misery. It comes from an absurdity around that misery.

— Simon Amstell

Desire is this absurdity that holds open the infinity of possibility. Ever optimistic, ever resourceful, desire tells us what it sees as it speeds…

— Wendy Farley

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

Thought of the incomprehensible sequence of changes and chances that make up a life, all the beauties and horrors and absurdities whose conjunctions create…

— Aldous Huxley

Such squeamish youths as cannot bear to be connected with a little absurdity are not worth a regret.

— Jane Austen

One would think that a system loaded with such gross and vulgar absurdities as Scripture religion is could never have obtained credit; yet we…

— Thomas Paine

Every sensible man, every honorable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror." "Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion…

— Voltaire

For it is an absurdity to call a country civilized in which a decent and industrious man, laboriously mastering a trade which is valuble…

— H. L. Mencken

The inner defenses are unconscious. They consist of a kind of magic aura which the mind builds around cherished belief. Arguments which penetrate into…

— Arthur Koestler

Even though you can't expect to defeat the absurdity of the world, you must make that attempt. That's morality, that's religion. That's art. That's…

— Phil Ochs