contrary

Watching someone insist on their version of reality in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary evokes all manner of emotions: disgust, anger, disbelief, admiration and, of course, doubt.

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 22, 2026

It appears that many of these fossils can’t be referred to South African species either, contrary to earlier assumptions.

From Science Daily ● Oct. 13, 2026

Using Artex for cyberattacks was "entirely contrary to" the developer's intentions, they added, without referring directly to the alleged South Korean cases.

From Barron's ● Oct. 9, 2026

The charges cover a period between 26 November 2024 and 21 May 2025 and allege conduct "in preparation for committing an offence of disclosing protected information" contrary to the act.

From BBC ● Oct. 8, 2026

Montaigne had already asked, ‘How many things are there which we call miraculous or contrary to Nature? All men and nations do that according to the measure of their ignorance.’

From "The Invention of Science" by David Wootton

We grow up to discover there are names in every culture for that — yin and yang, the Apollonian and Dionysian, Vishnu and Shiva, thesis and antithesis, the law of contraries, the dialectic.

From New York Times ● Feb. 12, 2024

Art is made of contraries, of ambivalence and ambiguity; it never wants us to feel a single thing.

From The Guardian ● May 8, 2020

She revels in detail but writes vast, moral poems that help us live in a world of contraries in which “we hold still for the camera, believing/ it will shore up time, knowing it won’t.”

From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 11, 2016

“The knowledge of contraries is one and the same,” as Aristotle said.

From Slate ● Jul. 8, 2014

Such is an ordinary function of committees and boards, and the sole aim of conciliations and concessions, to make contraries look the same, and to secure an outward agreement where there is no other unity.

From An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine by John Henry Cardinal Newman