Cultural Irony Quotes

Chess - it's a nonmainstream game. And the irony is that when you look at Hollywood, it kept using chess as the symbol of intelligence for its heroes, for its top characters, all the time. So it's from "Casablanca" to "Harry Potter." You always have chess as a very important element to demonstrate intelligence, while in normal life people think it's just a weird intelligence - like AI.

For a country that makes such a fuss about love on the 14th of February, America has a funny way of showing it on the other 364 days of the year.

Saeed quickly found employment at a Banana Republic, where he would sell to urban sophisticates the black turtleneck of the season, in a shop whose name was synonymous with colonial exploitation and the rapacious ruin of the third world.

No clowns were funny. That was the whole purpose of a clown. People laughed at clowns, but only out of nervousness. The point of clowns was that, after watching them, anything else that happened seemed enjoyable

At every point I wished that I was born English. They need to make it colder in here. You could hang meat in this room. But, yeah...I grew up in a very English household. My folks were from Liverpool. I've said this before, but there is nothing more English than an Englishman that no longer lives in England.

And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit "I don’t really mean what I’m saying." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: "How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.

The reason ... our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down.

I guess, being French, I love Hollywood.

Barbarians, we call them, while all the while we timidly cling to our Web like Visigoths crouching in the ruins of Rome's faded glory and proclaim ourselves civilized.

If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.

America is the only country in the world where you can burn the flag but can't tear the tag off the mattress.

The trouble with Germans is not that they fire shells, but that they engrave them with quotations from Kant.

There is a painful joke that Europeans often tell of their Gallic neighbors: God created France, the most beautiful country in the world with so much good in it, and ended up feeling guilty about it. He had to do something to make it fair. And so, he created the French people.

So, the Phoenix Suns are wearing jerseys written in Spanish, made in China, modeled after their best player, Canadian Steve Nash. There you go. That is America.

Do people think Swedes are cool? I think they think you're cool in spite of you being Swedish. But the good thing with being Swedish is that we're melancholic.

The country of Mexico has just gotten its first Taco Bell. You're Welcome. Finally, Mexicans will have access to... Mexican food. Bon appetit. I can't imagine how confused they will be when they get a taco.

There's something comic about the town. You have the spot where the Pilgrims landed -- and right next to it a giant motel. I've always loved that. There's the very spirit of America expressing itself!

Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil!

One of the special beauties of America is that it is the only country in the world where you are not advised to learn the language before entering. Before I ever set out for the United States, I asked a friend if I should study American. His answer was unequivocal. "On no account," he said. "The more English you sound, the more likely you are to be believed."

Irony is going to be hard to get. You have to be master of the literal first. But then, Americans don't get irony either. Computers are going to reach the level of Americans before Brits.

Quite often I can be in a bookshop, standing beneath a great big picture of myself and paying for a book with a credit card clearly marked John Grisham, yet no one recognises me. I often say I'm a famous author in a country where no one reads.

Like other secret lovers, many speak mockingly about popular culture to conceal their passion for it.

I like the English. They have the most rigid code of immorality in the world.

In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime.