"Contradiction in terms" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it has continued the same," said Mrs. Corey, again expressing the fact by a contradiction in terms. "I think I ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... some object or other,—I move my limbs; I strike my enemy. The presence of a transitive verb implies also the presence of a noun; which noun is the name of the object affected. A transitive verb, unaccompanied by a noun, either expressed or understood, is a contradiction in terms. The absence of the nouns, in and of itself, makes it intransitive. I move means, simply, I am in a state of moving. I strike means, simply, I am in the act of striking. Verbs like move and strike are ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... happen to a good man in this life, and therefore presumably misfortunes may also overtake him in any other life that there may be. The only evil that can never befall him is vice, because that would be a contradiction in terms. Unless therefore Socrates was uttering idle words on the most solemn occasion of his life, he must be taken to have meant that there is no evil but vice, which implies that there is no good but virtue. Thus we are landed at ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... it necessarily loses in the discipline of experience with its possible fruits of wisdom and self-control. Association is a condition of individuality. International relations are a condition of nationality. A universal nation is as much a contradiction in terms as a universal individual. A nation seeking to destroy other nations is analogous to a man who seeks to destroy the society in which he was born. Little by little European history has been teaching this lesson; and in the course of time the correlation ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... is in direct logical contradiction to the phrase "particular one." To say, of anything, that it has not "individual existence," and yet that it is a "particular one," involves the logical fallacy called a "contradiction in terms." ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
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