Neither irony nor sarcasm is argument. [ Rufus Choate ]

Irony is jesting hidden behind gravity. [ John Weiss ]

Irony is the purulence of our moral wounds. [ De Finod ]

Clap an extinguisher upon your Irony, if you are unhappily blessed with a vein of it. [ Lamb ]

With the world, do not resort to injuries, but only to irony and gayety: injury revolts, while irony makes one reflect, and gayety disarms. [ Voltaire ]

Irony is to the high-bred what billingsgate is to the vulgar; and when one gentleman thinks another gentleman an ass, he does not say it pointblank, he implies it in the politest terms he can invent. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]

Irony is an insult conveyed in the form of a compliment placing its victim naked on a bed of briars and bristles, thinly covered with rose-leaves, adorning his brow with a crown of gold, which burns into his brain; teasing, and fretting, and riddling him through and through with incessant discharges of hot shot from a masked battery; laying bare the most sensitive and shrinking nerves of his mind, and then blandly touching them with ice, or smilingly pricking them with needles. [ E. P. Whipple ]