Source: Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal
“Neither irony nor sarcasm is argument.”
Rufus Choate (1799–1859) American politician
As quoted in Dictionary of American Maxims (1955) by David George Plotkin
As quoted in Lifetime Speaker's Encyclopedia (1962) edited by Jacob Morton Braude, p. 50.
Variant: Neither irony or sarcasm is argument.
Nicole Hollander (1939) Cartoonist
Source: Sylvia cartoon strip, p. 97
Miss Shangay Lily (1963–2016) Spanish artivist and drag queen
Miss Shangay Lily, Feminist Monologues for A Diva
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975) Russian composer and pianist
In conversation with Flora Litvinova, 1970; cited from Elizabeth Wilson Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (1994) pp. 425-6.
“Sentimental irony is a dog that bays at the moon while pissing on graves.”
Karl Kraus (1874–1936) Czech playwright and publicist
Half-Truths and One-And-A-Half Truths (1976)
“Irony, forsooth! Guard yourself, Engineer, from the sort of irony that thrives up here”
Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain
Source: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 5
Context: Irony, forsooth! Guard yourself, Engineer, from the sort of irony that thrives up here; guard yourself altogether from taking on their mental attitude! Where irony is not a direct and classic device of oratory, not for a moment equivocal to a healthy mind, it makes for depravity, it becomes a drawback to civilization, an unclean traffic with the forces of reaction, vice and materialism.
Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952) Soviet diplomat
The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman (1926)
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804–1869) French literary critic
Gardons-nous de l'ironie en jugeant. De toutes les dispositions de l'esprit, l'ironie est la moins intelligente.
Notebook entry, February 24, 1848, cited from Les cahiers de Sainte-Beuve (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1876) p. 75; Christopher Prendergast The Classic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007) p. 244.
