So Laughable Quotes & Sayings

Our reputations are so out of our control that it's laughable how much time and effort so many of us put into trying to "control" them. — Taite Adams

Imagine a room awash in gasoline, and there are two implacable enemies in that room. One of them has nine thousand matches. The other has seven thousand matches. Each of them is concerned about who's ahead, who's stronger. Well that's the kind of situation we are actually in. The amount of weapons that are available to the United States and the Soviet Union are so bloated, so grossly in excess of what's needed to dissuade the other, that if it weren't so tragic, it would be laughable. What is necessary is to reduce the matches and to clean up the gasoline. — Carl Sagan

Why should not every individual man have existed more than once upon this world? Why should I not come back as often as I am capable of acquiring fresh knowledge? Is this hypothesis so laughable merely because it is the oldest? Because the human understanding, before the sophistries of the schools had dissipated and debilitated it, lighted upon it at once? — Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Darkness attracted him as much as light. He knew that these days turning out the light before making love was considered laughable, and so he always left a small lamp burning over the bed. At the momemnt he penetrated sabina, however, he closed his eyes. The pleasure suffusing his body called for darkness. The darkness was pure, perfect, thoughtless, vision less; that darkness was without end, without borders; that darkness was the infinite we each carry within us. — Milan Kundera

Not so with our characters. They have no metaphysics, no order, no law. They are miserable and they don't know why. They are puppets, undone. In short, they represent modern man. Their situation is not tragic, since it has no relation to a higher order. Instead, it's ridiculous, laughable, and derisory. — Eugene Ionesco

Well!" said John Slater, after having acknowledged his nose and his likeness; "I could laugh at a jest as well as e'er the best on 'em, though it did tell agen mysel, if I were not clemming" (his eyes filled with tears; he was a poor, pinched, sharp-featured man, with a gentle and melancholy expression of countenance), "and if I could keep from thinking of them at home, as is clemming; but with their cries for food ringing in my ears, and making me afeard of going home, and wonder if I should hear 'em wailing out, if I lay cold and drowned at th' bottom o' th' canal, there - why, man, I cannot laugh at aught. It seems to make me sad that there is any as can make game on what they've never knowed; as can make such laughable pictures on men, whose very hearts within 'em are so raw and sore as ours were and are, God help us." John — Elizabeth Gaskell

I believe in the basics: attention to, and perfection of, tiny details that might be commonly overlooked. They may seem trivial, perhaps even laughable to those who don't understand, but they aren't. They are fundamental to your progress in basketball, business, and life. They are the difference between champions and near champions.
For example, at the first squad meeting each season, held two weeks before our first actual practice, I personally demonstrated how I wanted players to put on their socks each and every time: Carefully roll the socks down over the toes, ball of the foot, arch and around the heel, then pull the sock up snug so there will be no wrinkles of any kind. — John Wooden

If I were to name the one crying evil of American life, Mr. Derrick, it would be the indifference of the better people to public affairs. It is so in all our great centres. There are other great trusts, God knows, in the United States besides our own dear P. and S.W. Railroad. Every state has its own grievance. If it is not a railroad trust, it is a sugar trust, or an oil trust, or an industrial trust, that exploits the People, because the people allow it. The indifference of the People is the opportunity of the despot. It is as true as that the whole is greater than the part, and the maxim is so old that it is trite - it is laughable. It is neglected and disused for the sake of some new ingenious and complicated theory, some wonderful scheme of reorganization, the fact remains, nevertheless, simple, fundamental, everlasting. The People have but to say 'No' and not the strongest tyranny, political, religious, or financial, that was ever organized, could survive one week. — Frank Norris

As for the secularist belief that says 'if we were to eliminate all religions, the world would know peace,' this is the Atheist Heaven; thus it is so important to him (although perhaps more laughable than some say the Christian Heaven). It is about as useless as saying 'if all people were true Christians, the world would know peace,' or 'if all people were devout Muslims, the world would know peace.' And even yet, the secular dream could remain active only for a time before generational rebellion and freedom of thought were to kick in anew. — Criss Jami

It was funny, thought Lis, how everything seemed possible in the middle of the night. The fairy tales had seemed almost laughable at school. They weren't so funny any more. — James Dawson

Politics is much too serious to be taken too seriously; equally, there are many aspects of it so laughable as to be lamentable. — Charles Kennedy

She supposed the lake was part of her dowry, now. Michael would have to ask permission to fish there. He would have to ask her husband permission to fish there. The idea would be laughable if it weren't so ... wrong. — Sarah MacLean

When we combine very real workplace inequalities with these romantic opt-out stories, the idea that "having it all" is a laughable goal becomes enshrined as immutable truth. And when we portray opting out as a simple matter of "choice," we ignore the systematic problems that make combining work and motherhood so difficult. — Emily Matchar

How could I have been so blind as to want a soul? It was laughable now, to think that a soul could live inside me without being tainted by the centuries of blood and evil and death.
The voices agreed, laughing at me, mocking my quest. I didn't deserve a soul; I didn't deserve happiness, or peace. Why should I get my happy ending, when I'd left a swath of horror and destruction behind me wherever I went? — Julie Kagawa

Small actions are at the heart of kaizen. By taking steps so tiny that they seem trivial or even laughable, you'll sail calmly past obstacles that have defeated you before. Slowly - but painlessly! - you'll cultivate an appetite for continued success and lay down a permanent new route to change. — Robert D. Maurer

What is so often laughable, in the stories of Kundera's Czechoslovakia, is how grimly serious just about everything turns out to be, jokes and games and pleasure included; what's laughable is how terribly little there is to laugh at with any joy. — Philip Roth

You do that, buddy, and get back to me," Jonathon joked. I eyed the vampire and coven member. The love of my life and my friend. Could Jonathon and Isaac become friends? The idea was almost laughable. Almost.
"Oh, so we have pet names now do we," Isaac looked thoughtful for a moment, "If I'm buddy I think I'll call you buttercup. — Micalea Smeltzer

My paper has to be very long and complex," I said. "I shall cite all the great thinkers - Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud." "What about Adolf Hitler?" "Oh, him. He's not a thinker. He's just a ranter and raver." "There may come a time," said Pepi, "when people cannot tell the difference." "Impossible," I solemnly predicted. "I have read Hitler's book Mein Kampf and also some works by his colleague Herr Alfred Rosenberg because I am a fair-minded, objective person and I believe one should always hear out all sides before making a decision, and so I can tell you from firsthand knowledge that these men are idiots. Their ideas about how the Jews have poisoned their so-called superior Aryan race and caused all of Germany's troubles are utter nonsense. No intelligent person could possibly believe them. Hitler is laughable. He will soon disappear." "Just like all your old boyfriends," Pepi said with his sly smile. — Edith Hahn Beer

I'm an actor and a writer and a showrunner and I edit my show ... I have a job that three people usually have, and I have it in one person. And the idea that the critic thought that I had this excess of time for which I could go to, like, panels or write essays was just so laughable to me. — Mindy Kaling

Well, I'm not sure the New York Times was consciously trying to trivialise me, but the effect of it is to put everything in the same category as the gossip you read in the magazines you pick up at supermarket counters. I was asked, for example, why I thought there were so many euphemisms for genitalia. It's not a serious question. Whatever the purpose of such a tone is, the effect is to make it appear that anyone who departs from orthodox political doctrine is in some ways laughable. — Noam Chomsky

A good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more's the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be spent in that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for. — Herman Melville

Some men want to believe their kingship will make them stronger, more invulnerable to life's sorrows so that hurts do not hurt, pain is laughable. They are surprised to discover the paradox of strength - only the truly vulnerable possess the ability to love powerfully. — Edmond Manning

Don't blame me," Jason protested. "All I did was ask an innocent question. I'm not the one telling Gwen she has to get out."
"I said that's enough!" Frank smacked the table hard. "We're not going to talk about it anymore, and we're not going to hand out blame. Is that clear, Jason? If Gwen can handle this in a mature way, there's no reason for you to raise the roof."
Now they were both looking at Gwen, waiting for her to show how mature she was. "I think," she began. "I think--" She swallowed hard. "I think I'm going to be sick." With a hand pressed over her mouth, she dashed out of the room and up the stairs, making it to the bathroom just in time.
Afterward, she sat on the bathroom floor and leaned against the old-fashioned footed tub. Three people out of five, she thought wryly. It would be laughable, the way she and Dena and Tessie had leaped up and run, one after the other, if it weren't so sad. — Betty Ren Wright

I don't like anything unsigned in a newspaper that purports to be the opinion of some group if we don't know who the group is. It's laughable to say that The Miami Herald's editorials or any newspaper's editorials represent any views other than those of the people writing them, so why don't we tell everybody who they are? — Dave Barry

When you're young, you kind of take yourself seriously, and you think, like, "People need to see what I can do." And it's so laughable, especially with actors. — Will Arnett

If you curse the world, it will bring you sorrow.'
'I'm already so unhappy it's laughable. — Satoshi Mizukami

Elisabeth, can't you imagine that you could love someone so terribly that just because of it you couldn't go to bed with him? — Milan Kundera

Your past self's family was rich. Filthy rich.You'll see when you meet her.She goes by Lucinda and thinks your nickname is an absolute abomination, by the way." Bill pinched his nose and lifted it hight in the air,giving a pretty laughable imitation of a snob. "She's rich, yes,but you, my dear, are a time-traveling intruder who knows not the ways of this high society. So unless you want to stick out like a Manchester seamstress and get shown the door before you even get to have a chat with Lucinda, you need to go undercover. You're a scullery maid. Serving girl. Chamber-bot changer. It's really up to you.Don't worry,I'll stay out of your way.I can disappear in the blink of an eye. — Lauren Kate

A saving grace of the human condition (if I may phrase it like that) is a sense of humor. Many writers and witnesses, guessing the connection between sexual repression and religious fervor, have managed to rescue themselves and others from its deadly grip by the exercise of wit. And much of religion is so laughable on its face that writers from Voltaire to Bertrand Russell to Chapman Cohen have had great fun at its expense. In our own day, the humor of scientists such as Richard Dawkins and Carl Sagan has ridiculed the apparent inability of the creator to know, let alone to understand, what he has created. Gods seem not to know of any animals except the ones tended by their immediate worshippers and seem to be ignorant as well of microbes and the laws of physics. The self-evident man-madeness of religion, as well as its masculine-madeness in respect of religion's universal commitment to male domination, is one of the first things to strike the eye. — Christopher Hitchens

People like the Mormons and the Scientologists, who I think should combine and make a Mormontologist because what they believe is just so out there it's just laughable. — Bill Maher

Men find powerful women so threatening, and finding a partner was starting to look laughable, because I would be really attracted to guys and they would just be so threatened and I didn't like feeling threatening, I didn't want to feel threatened, I didn't want to feel like I was towering over anybody. — Amanda Palmer

It's so laughable that it's somewhere beyond comedy and right into tragedy again. — Libba Bray

I was just at the newly opened Creationist Museum in Kentucky ... And they have this exhibit of a giant dinosaur ... with a saddle on its back. Because the world is only 5000 years old, so man and the dinosaurs had to coexist, and, of course, we rode them. A theory I thought laughable at the age of eight when I saw it on the Flintstones! — Bill Maher

Anna is part of a generation that often seems frozen in place by their unreleting sense of irony. Virtually everything people believe in can be exposed as possessing laughable inconsistencies. And so they laugh. And stand still. — Scott Turow

Finally, to hinder the description of illness in literature, there is the poverty of the language. English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. It has all grown one way. The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready made for him. He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out. Probably it will be something laughable. — Virginia Woolf

If not so tragic, it would be laughable. Both sides os blinded by their fear and hate of each other that they couldn't see that they were all fighting for the same thing- for the men to leave this island. Insanity! — Brom

If we were allowed to go online here, I'd tell you to search Wikipedia for chickens plus cannibals so that you could verify."
"Wikipedia's your source?" That was laughable. "Oh, please. The poultry industry probably paid big money to get chicken cannibals on there. It's an urban myth."
...
"Why would the poultry industry spread a myth that chickens were cannibals? — Sarah Strohmeyer

No, no, you have none of you any idea. This is all nonsense, fantasy, it is not like this. Nothing so blood-curdling and becreepered and crude - not so ... so laughable. The truth is quite other, and altogether more terrible. — Susan Hill

Ah, but it wasn't just her lovely face that haunted him. Nor the soft, lush body he was increasingly desperate to see liberated from that woolen cocoon. It was the way she'd so willingly owned up to the truth. The way her spirit had sparked when he'd told her to put aside her art. The way she'd practically made sweet, innocent love to him with her eyes when he'd said he cared if she lived or died.
Good Lord. The laughable irony of it. He'd wasted weeks of his adolescence memorizing sonnets, spent years perfecting little murmured innuendos. Only to learn the most seductive phrase in the English language was something akin to: All things being equal, I'd rather not see you mauled by a shark. — Tessa Dare

Ruin, therefore, is not caused by lavatories but it's something that starts in people's heads. So when these clowns start shouting "Stop the ruin!" - I laugh!' 'I swear to you, I find it laughable! Every one of them needs to hit himself on the back of the head and then when he has knocked all the hallucinations out of himself and gets on with sweeping out backyards - which is his real job - all this "ruin" will automatically disappear — Mikhail Bulgakov

The notion that critics of the drone program are being manipulated by propaganda from terrorist organizations "would be laughable, were it not so offensive towards civilian victims of drone strikes." A — Jeremy Scahill

So, really," continued Jacob as if this were perfectly normal to expound on art in these circumstances, "when you think about it, the artists who make people stop and think, who push the form, who make you uncomfortable, who are laughable, well, they're the ones who get remembered." Idly, Jacob dug a hole in the snow with his shovel and then another one next to it. "So why wouldn't you want to join the ranks of the ridiculed? — Justina Chen

Without warning, Wesley lifted me up onto the pool table. His hands moved to my shoulders, and a second later, I was flat on my back, staring up at him as he smirked. He shifted so that he was on the table too, leaning over me with his face only inches from mine.
"On the pool table?" I said, narrowing my eyes at him. "Seriously?"
"I can't resist," he said. "You know, you're pretty sexy when you're pissed at me, Duffy."
First, I was struck by the irony of that statement. I mean, he used sexy and Duffy-implying I was fat and ugly-in the same sentence. The contrast was almost laughable. Almost. — Kody Keplinger

When I started out in the eighties, the idea of creating serious comics for adults was pretty laughable to most folks, and for the longest time it was hard to even explain what alternative comics or graphic novels were. Nobody seemed to understand or care. Not so, any longer. — Seth

Seems like the cold would never go away and winter would be like the bottom of my feet but then it is gone in one night and in its place comes the sun so large and laughable. — Sherman Alexie

Abstraction in photography is ridiculous, and is only an imitation of painting. We stopped imitating painters a hundred years ago, so to imitate them in this day and age is laughable. — Berenice Abbott

Never has nostalgia held stronger sway; never has the belief in the redemptive possibilities of the future seemed so laughable. — Ann Marlowe

What we do and what we take seriously can often be so far removed from what it is actually all about that it is laughable. We get bogged down in trivia, lost in irrelevant detail to such an extent that our life can whizz past and we don't even notice. By letting go of things that really aren't important, we can put ourselves back on the right track. And the best way to do that is through humor - laughing at ourselves, laughing at our situation, but never laughing at others - they're just as lost as we are and don't need to be laughed at. — Richard Templar