Inconsistency Quotes

“The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can't make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values.”
― Theodore J. Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future

“Hard to trust honesty of inconsistent person.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“I am metaphysical being, mystical and emotional, skeptical and cynical, happy and boisterous, loud and bawdy, quiet and melancholy, tender and cruel, full of mirth and despair. Inherent inconsistences mark me as part of nature, which is neither cruel nor fair, or reliable or predictable.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“My aim is not to be consistent with my previous statements on a given question, but to be consistent with truth as it may present itself to me at a given moment. The result has been that I have grown from truth to truth.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“How often have you and I helped to keep sinners easy in their sin, by our inconsistency! Had we been true Christians, the wicked man would often have been pricked to the heart, and his conscience would have convicted him.”
― Charles H. Spurgeon

“The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance and Other Essays

“It is a wonderful thing to be liked by a stranger, but without respect it is pointless. It is like pulling the pedals off a rose and throwing the stem at the person you like. It’s creepy, but had good intentions that suddenly experienced some strange form of verticillium wilt, during the climate change of their mood.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“The constant, obvious flattery, contrary to all evidence, of the people around him [Tsar Nicholas I] had brought him to the point that he no longer saw his contradictions, no longer conformed his actions and words to reality, logic, or even simple common sense, but was fully convinced that all his orders, however senseless, unjust, and inconsistent with each other, became sensible, just, and consistent with each other only because he gave them.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Hadji Murád

“In practice, such trifles as contradictions in principle are easily set aside; the faculty of ignoring them makes the practical man.”
― Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

“Men are seldom struck by incongruities in their appearance any more than their own conduct.”
― James Fenimore Cooper, The Deerslayer

“A widespread meticulous consistency causes a bigger suspicion than the most obvious inconsistency does.”
― Pawan Mishra, Coinman: An Untold Conspiracy

“He can be made to take a positive pleasure in the perception that the two sides of his life are inconsistent... by exploiting his vanity. He can... enjoy kneeling beside the grocer on Sunday just because he remembers that the grocer could not possibly understand the urbane and mocking world which he inhabited on Saturday evening; and contrariwise, to enjoy the bawdy and blasphemy over the coffee with these admirable friends all the more because he is aware of a "deeper," "spiritual" world within him which they can not understand. You see the idea - the worldly friends touch him on one side and the grocer on the other, and he is the complete, balanced, complex man who sees round them all. Thus, while being permanently treacherous to at least two sets of people, he will feel, instead of same, a continual under-current of self-satisfaction... and that to cease to do so would be "priggish," "intolerant," and... "Puritanical.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“We are all lumps, and of so various and inform a contexture, that every piece plays, every moment, its own game, and there is as much difference betwixt us and ourselves as betwixt us and others.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“Because most of us are shielded (or shield ourselves) from the unpleasant realities associated with the routine use of animals, we can maintain a view of ourselves as animal lovers by being kind to the few living animals we personally encounter.”
― Grace Clement

“Superficiality results in vacillating inconsistency, and emotions for the narcissistic person range from intense to detached on a regular basis. A healthy relationship should feel like a safe harbor in your life. Life throws us enough curve balls in the shape of money problems, work issues, medical issues, household issues, and even the weather. Sadly, a relationship with a narcissist can be one more source of chaos in your life, rather than a place of comfort and consistency.”
― Ramani Durvasula, Should I Stay or Should I Go?: Surviving a Relationship with a Narcissist

“Inconsistency is a great door for the change and for the progression! Never hesitate to be inconsistent!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Only when you give up being consistent will you find the truth! Inconsistency makes you free to discover other roads.”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“An inconsistent political philosophy is that which feeds our battle yet starves our victory.”
― Mike Klepper

“Liquor, guns, motorcycle helmets (legislation had gone back and forth on that)—mainly white masculine pursuits—are fairly unregulated. But for women and black men, regulation is greater. Within given parameters, federal law gives women the right to decide whether or not to abort a fetus. But the state of Louisiana has imposed restrictions on clinics offering the procedure, which, if upheld in the U.S. Supreme Court, would prevent all but one clinic, in New Orleans, from offering women access to it. Any adult in the state can also be jailed for transporting a teenager out of state for the purposes of an abortion if the teen has not informed her parents. Young black males are regulated too. Jefferson Davis Parish passed a bill banning the wearing of pants in public that revealed "skin beneath their waists or their underwear" and newspaper accounts featured images, taken from the back, of two black teenage boys exposing large portions of their undershorts. The parish imposed a $50 fine for a first offense and $100 for a second.”
― Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

“An inconsistency is built into the design of our mind.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“If we were to trace the arc of this resplendent moment to its uncertain trajectory, we might arrive at a time 10,000 years hence in which our story is likely to be told, albeit in the past tense, with the requisite degree of speculation and inconsistency and according to the values, perceptions and prevailing paradigms swirling about its storyteller—who, most certainly, would be just as alien and unseemly to us as we, in our primitive ways, would seem to him... Of course, we can suppose there to be some level of idealization in the storytelling—even if he...were to examine fastidiously all records of our associations, contracts, interactions, transactions and endeavors, he would still come away with his own set of presumptions, in a manner, no different than the sort to be drawn away through the course of taking epistemological preference. Certain facts, agreements and events will unduly be assigned a preponderance of emphasis whilst others, though critical in their own time and to its chief actors, will be glossed over for their lack of sexiness to the keen observer of historical fact. Certain moments will be lost and others manufactured in their place, and these conscripted fabrications will define future idealizations of this moment of time—this, as you are sure to find, deeply critical moment in the history of our species.”
― Ashim Shanker, Inward and Toward

“Judging types are in a hurry to make decisions. Perceiving types are not. This is why science doesn’t make any serious attempt to reach a final theory of everything. It always says, “Let’s do another experiment. And another. And another.” When will the experimentation ever end? When will scientists conclude that they have now collected easily enough data to now draw definitive conclusions? But they don’t want to draw any such conclusions. That’s not how they roll. Their method has no such requirement. That’s why many of them openly say that they do not want a final theory. It will stop them, they say, from “discovering” new things. Judging types like order and structure. They like decisions, conclusions, getting things done and reaching objectives. Perceiving types are doubtful and skeptical about all of that. They frequently refer to judging types as “judgmental”, which is literally perceived as a bad thing, “authoritarian”, “totalitarian”, “fascist”, “Nazi”, and so on. Perceiving types always want to have an open road ahead of them. They never want to actually arrive. Judging types cannot see the point of not wanting to reach your destination.”
― Thomas Stark, Extra Scientiam Nulla Salus: How Science Undermines Reason

“The earliest known copies of Jewish Scriptures in Hebrew dated to the tenth and eleventh centuries CE, and among them the differences were mostly small and insignificant. Taking them as witnesses to the earlier texts from which they were copied, it seemed logical to conclude that these many homogeneous texts must have derived from a common original via a highly accurate scribal tradition. But evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls seems to contradict this conclusion. Among the hundreds of biblical manuscripts discovered there, many of which are more than a thousand years older than anything scholars had ever seen before, we find not uniformity but diversity, including many significant differences. The logical assumption now is that Jewish Scriptures became more uniform and free of variants over time, as scribes gradually established a more or less standard edition.”
― Timothy Beal, The Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book

“When the world is supporting them, their needs are getting met, they do not think there is anything wrong anyhow, and they are unable to see, hear, or feel the needs of others, the likelihood of change is close to zero. The primitive and emotional nature of a close personal relationship means that the lack of empathy, the rage, the distance, the control, and the inconsistency have tremendous power in shaping the life and the inner world of a person in a narcissistic relationship. Close relationships can activate the best and the worst in us, but the deep emotional demands of an intimate relationship are out of reach for a person with narcissistic personality disorder.”
― Ramani Durvasula, Should I Stay or Should I Go?: Surviving a Relationship with a Narcissist

“Each broken relationship caused a sort of identity crisis because I didn’t have an identity of my own. I was as much a living incarnation of inconsistency as the culture around me.”
― Michael J Heil, Pursued: God’s relentless pursuit and a drug addict’s journey to finding purpose

“It was as if he took the complexity of human beings as a personal affront, the maddening inconsistency of human beings, their contradictions which they made no attempt to wipe out or reconcile, their mixture of idealism and concupiscence, grandeur and pettiness, truth and lies. They were not to be taken seriously any more than a cockroach deserves serious consideration.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights