D. Graham Burnett and Jeffrey Andrew Dolven: Irony is a powerful and incompletely understood feature of human dynamics. A technique for dissimulation and "secret speech," irony is considerably more complex than lying and even more dangerous. Ideally suited to mobilization on the shifting terrain of asymmetrical conflict, inherently covert, insidiously plastic, politically potent, irony offers rogue elements a volatile if often overlooked means by which to demoralize opponents and destabilize regimes. And yet while major research resources have for forty years poured into the human sciences from the defense and intelligence community in an effort to gain control over the human capacity to lie (investments that led to the modern polygraph, sodium pentothal-derived truth serums, "brain fingerprinting," etc.), we have no comparable tradition of sustained, empirical, applied investigation into irony. We know very little about its specific manifestations in foreign cultures; we understand almost nothing about the neurological basis of its expression; we are without forward-looking strategies for its mastery and mobilization in the interest of national defense. This project-a sustained three-year, three-pronged, interdisciplinary investigation, drawing on social scientists, engineers, and neurobiologists--will position Lockheed Martin for field leadership in a crucial new area of strategic and commercial growth.
H.P. Lovecraft: From the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent.
Justine Cooper: What we offer people here is a certain vision, Mr. Rydell. A certain darkness as well. A Gothic quality. We do quite a good business with the more affluent residents of South Central. They, at least, have a sense of irony. I suppose they have to.
John Gray: The irony of the current phase of globalization is that it universalizes the demand for a better life without providing the means to satisfy it.
On Barbara Kruger: By using familiar images and text from modern advertising, she forcefully exposes the misleading and aggressive lies of pop media. Her works involve humor and irony, though they are often disturbing at the same time.
Recently, ubernoir on Decius: An accusation that I have heard repeatedly leveled at Americans is that they have no sense of irony. I think I might bookmark [a post by Decius] as Exhibit A in my case for the defence.
Marc Siegel: We live temperature-controlled, largely disease-controlled lives. And yet, we worry more than ever before.
The ironic cloud | 
