Ludicrous Quotes

“He was no storyteller, as he had said, but that made it more enjoyable somehow, watching his serious face as he described flying horses and golden apples.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“Now, I can understand why the appearance of a man struggling violently, as it would seem, with an airy nothing, and calling for assistance against a vision, should have appeared ludicrous. Then, so great was my rage against the mocking crowd that had I the power I would have stricken them dead where they stood.”
― Fitz-James O'Brien

“NASA astronauts have only managed to live continuously on the International Space Station (ISS) for a year and Biosphere 2 on Earth failed at two years of uninterrupted human habitation. Both cases required extracting the sickened people from the toxic environments. At this point it is ludicrous to talk about a permanent manned base on Mars.”
― Steven Magee

“Dumbledore made and Draco and I follow him. He kept shouting at us angrily.

"You ludacris fools!" he shouted.”
― Tara Gilesbie, My Immortal

“Politics - a lucrative game for the ludicrous.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Eternity before and after us renders every painful effort for victory over other people absurd, almost ludicrous.”
― Giannis Delimitsos, NOVEL PHILOSOPHY: New ideas about Ethics, Epistemology, Science and the sweet Life

“And then, on the final day, it was time for the faux Underground Railroad. This is the part that no one believes. "No adult would ever do that," they say. "You can't be remembering that right." I am, in fact, remembering it perfectly. The counselors "shackled" us together with jump ropes so we were "like slave families" and then released us into the woods. We were given a map with a route to "freedom" in "the North", which must have been only three or four hundred feet but felt like much more. Then a counselor on horseback followed ten minutes later, acting as a bounty hunter. Hearing hooves, I crouched being a rock with Jason Baujelais and Sari Brooker, begging them to be quiet so we weren't caught and "whipped." I was too young, self-involved, and dissociated to wonder what kind of impact this had on my black classmates. All I knew was that I was miserable. We heard the sound of hooves growing closer and Max Kitnick's light asthma wheezes from beind an oak tree. "Shut up," Jason hissed, and I knew we were cooked. When the counselor appeared, Sari started to cry.”
― Lena Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"

“What is it that Australians celebrate on 26 January? Significantly, many of them are not quite sure what event they are commemorating. Their state of mind fascinated Egon Kisch, an inquisitive Czech who was in Sydney at the end of January 1935. Kisch has a place in our history as the victim, or hero, of a ludicrous chapter in the history of our immigration laws. He had been invited to Melbourne for a Congress against War and Fascism, and was forbidden to land by order of the attorney-general, R. G. Menzies. He had jumped overboard, broken his leg, gone to hospital, failed a dictation test in Gaelic and been sentenced to imprisonment and deportation. When the High Court declared Gaelic not a language, Kisch was free to hobble on our soil...”
― K.S. Inglis, Observing Australia: 1959–1999

“Mentally ill, insane, mad, crazy, ludicrous, mentally unstable....”
― Deyth Banger

“Once one committed to finding an angel, claiming agnosticism was ludicrous.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, The Lifecycle of Suns

“This is why the conclusion of the book cannot be a strategy for winning the cultural game. Any such strategy would betray the thesis. The point is precisely that panludism cannot be solved by optimisation, because optimisation is the disease-form of play. The book instead closes on a criterion: whenever play is used to extract obedience, it ceases to be play; whenever play preserves the possibility of refusal, it becomes a form of freedom. The final level is therefore not triumph but exit. Not the victory screen, but the ability to stop, to step back, to accept loss without humiliation, and to remember that rules are human and victories provisional. In Homo Ludens 2.1 the most subversive act is not to play harder, but to play lightly. If panludism names the condition, then the answer to the condition is not a new ideology but a recovered attitude: the capacity to participate without surrendering the self to the scoreboard, and to treat even the most totalising games as what they are—temporary arrangements sustained only by continued belief. A culture that plays incessantly but cannot play freely is a culture at war with its own humanity. The task, then, is not to end play, but to rescue play from the systems that have learned to profit from it.
Civilisation becomes dangerous not when people play, but when they forget that they are playing and mistake the game for destiny. Culture turns cruel at the moment seriousness hardens into necessity and rules begin to demand sacrifice rather than consent. To recover the ludic is therefore not to escape responsibility, but to remember that every role, institution, and value is sustained only by continued participation. Play is the last defence against absolute meaning, because it preserves the right to step aside, to lose, and to exit without disgrace. A society that cannot tolerate losing will always compensate by demanding victims. The most radical freedom left to Homo Ludens is not winning the game, but remembering that the game can always be left. The Ludicrous Culture survives wherever humans remember that meaning is something they play with together, not something that must be obeyed at the cost of life.

“Play is older than culture, for culture presupposes human society, and human society has not waited for culture to begin playing. Civilization arises and unfolds in and as play.”
—Johan Huizinga”
― Peter Ayolov, The Ludicrous Culture: Homo Ludens 2.1