Pretense Quotes - Page 5

• Is it not the artist who - like our dreams - dissolves the pretenses that hide us from ourselves, disclosing both our self-serving fantasies and our unsuspected potentialities?

  Dorothy Norman

  Dream, Artist, Self

  Dorothy Norman (1969). “The Hero: Myth, Image, Symbol”, Anchor Books

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• Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.

  Thomas Sowell

  Government, Want, Politician

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• For this fear of death is indeed the pretense of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being the appearance of knowing the unknown; since no one knows whether death, which they in their fear apprehend to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.

  Socrates

  Real, Knowing, Evil

  "Apology". 29a - b. By Plato. Translated by Benjamin Jowett,

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• He dropped the pretense, and dropped his head, so his brow came to rest against the sun-warmed top of hers. His arms went around her and drew her in, and Karou and Akiva were like two matches struck against each other to flare starlight. With a sigh, she softened, and it was pure homecoming to melt against him and rest.

  Laini Taylor

  Two, Arms, Sun

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• Music, unleashed, can uplift and create and destroy, stripping away pretenses and leaving raw, exposed vulnerability behind.

  C.E. Murphy

  Uplifting, Leaving, Stripping

  C.E. Murphy (2010). “Truthseeker”, p.42, Del Rey

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• You've always lived a life of pretense, not a real life-- a simulated existence, not a genuine existence. Everything about you, everything you are, has always been pretense, never genuine, never real.

  Thomas Bernhard

  Real, Genuine, Existence

  Thomas Bernhard (2011). “Woodcutters”, p.41, Faber & Faber

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• I assure you, Constable Morgan, I am quite sane, as I understand the word, perhaps the sanest person in this room, for I suffer from no illusions. I have freed myself, you see, from the pretense that burdens most men. Much like our prey, I do not impose order where there is none; I do not pretend there is any more than what there is, or that you and I are anything more than what we are. That is the essence of their beauty, Morgan, the aboriginal purity of their being, and why I admire them.

  Rick Yancey

  Men, Order, Essence

  Rick Yancey (2010). “The Monstrumologist: The Terror Beneath”, p.227, Simon and Schuster

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• Probably no one of us has the True Religion. But all of us together - if we are allowed to be free - are discovering ways of conversing about the great mysteries. The pretense to know all the answers to the deepest mysteries is, of course, the grossest fraud. And any people who declare a Jihad, a holy war on unbelievers - those who do not share their believers' pretended omniscience - are enemies of thinking men and woman and of civilization. I see religion as only a way of asking unanswerable questions, of sharing the joy of a community of quest, and solacing one another in our ignorance.

  Daniel J. Boorstin

  War, Ignorance, Men

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• of the world and drudgery of business , seeks a pretense of reason to give itself a full and uncontrolled indulgence.

  David Hume

  Giving, World, Reason

  John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume (2013). “The Empiricists: Locke: Concerning Human Understanding; Berkeley: Principles of Human Knowledge & 3 Dialogues; Hume: Concerning Human Understanding & Concerning Natural Religio”, p.334, Anchor

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• There is a constant rush to judgment in Foucault. He is filled with specious generalizations, false categories, distortions, fudging, pretenses to knowledge in areas where he was ignorant. He had no ability whatsoever to distinguish among historical sources, where he makes terrible blunders.

  Camille Paglia

  Historical, Ignorant, Judgment

  "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf". Camille Paglia, "Arion", Third Series, Volume 1, No. 2, Spring 1991.

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• The scientist who yields anything to theology, however slight, is yielding to ignorance and false pretenses, and as certainly as if he granted that a horse-hair put into a bottle of water will turn into a snake.

  H. L. Mencken

  Religious, Horse, Ignorance

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• Sometimes a god comes.... He brings a new way to do a thing, or a new thing to be done. A new kind of singing, or a new kind of death. He brings this across the bridge between the dream-time and the world-time. When he has done this, it is done. You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretenses. That is insanity. What is, is. There is no use pretending, now, that we do not know how to kill one another.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Dream, Wall, Bridges

  "The Word for World Is Forest". Book by Ursula K. Le Guin, 1972.

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• Since one cannot educate adults, the word "education" has an evil sound in politics; there is a pretense of education, when the real purpose is coercion without the use of force.

  Hannah Arendt

  Real, Evil, Sound

  Hannah Arendt, Jerome Kohn (2006). “Between Past and Future”, p.148, Penguin

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• The difference between [socialism and fascism] is superficial and purely formal, but it is significant psychologically: it brings the authoritarian nature of a planned economy crudely into the open. The main characteristic of socialism (and of communism) is public ownership of the means of production, and, therefore, the abolition of private property. The right to property is the right of use and disposal. Under fascism, men retain the semblance or pretense of private property, but the government holds total power over its use and disposal.

  Ayn Rand

  Mean, Power, Men

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• The management system which makes only a pretense of valuing employee involvement and encouraging employee empowerment merely breeds cynicism.

  George E. P. Box

  Cynical, Empowerment, Management

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• Relieved of moral pretense and stripped of folk costumes, the raw masculinity that all men know in their gut has to do with being good at being a man within a small, embattled gang of men struggling to survive.

  Jack Donovan

  Struggle, Men, Costumes

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• Having found the bomb we have used it. We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare. We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans.

  Harry S. Truman

  War, Order, Law

  Radio Report on the Potsdam Conference, delivered 9 August 1945, White House, Washington, D.C.

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• We are not deceived by their pretenses to piety. We have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions - by abandoning every value except the will to power - they follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way, to where it ends: in history's unmarked grave of discarded lies.

  George W. Bush

  Lying, Sacrifice, Presidential

  Address to Joint Session of Congress Following 9/11 Attacks, delivered 20 September 2001

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• Every one of the aristocratic conspirators and would-be murderers claims to be an arch-patriot; every one of them insists that the war is being waged to make the world safe for democracy. What humbug! What rot! What false pretense! These... tyrants, these red-handed robbers and murderers, the "patriots," while the men who have the courage to stand face to face with them, speak the truth, and fight for their exploited victims - they are [called] the disloyalists and traitors. If this be true, I want to take my place side by side with the traitors in this fight.

  Eugene V. Debs

  War, Fighting, Men

  Eugene V. Debs' speech he gave across the street from a jail, where he had just visited three socialists who were in prison for opposing the draft, June 1918.

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• An over-scrupulous jealousy of danger to the rights of the people, which is more commonly the fault of the head than of the heart, will be represented as mere pretense and artifice, the stale bait for popularity at the expense of the public good.

  Alexander Hamilton

  Heart, Rights, People

  James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay (2016). “The Federalist Papers: The Making of the US Constitution”, p.19, Arcturus Publishing

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• Our "society" is not a community, but merely a collection of isolated family units. Desperately insecure, fearing his woman will leave him if she's exposed to other men or to anything remotely resembling life, the male seeks to isolate her from other men and from what little civilization there is, so he moves her out to the suburbs, a collection of self-absorbed couples and their kids. Isolation, further, enables him to try to maintain his pretense of being an individual by being a "rugged individualist", a loner, equating non-co-operation and solitariness with individuality.

  Valerie Solanas

  Couple, Moving, Kids

  "SCUM Manifesto". P. 7, 1967.

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• The Fanaticism which discards the Scripture, under the pretense of resorting to immediate revelations is subversive of every principle of Christianity. For when they boast extravagantly of the Spirit, the tendency is always to bury the Word of God so they may make room for their own falsehoods.

  John Calvin

  Lying, Religion, May

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• Secrets find a way out in sleep . . . It is the place where there is no pretense.

  Bell Hooks

  Sleep, Secret, Way

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• A small town is automatically a world of pretense. Since everyone knows everyone else's business, it becomes the job of the populace to act as if they don't know what is going on instead of its being their job to try to find out.

  Jeanine Basinger

  Jobs, Trying, World

  Jeanine Basinger (2013). “A Woman's View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930-1960”, Knopf

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• One of the most repellent spectacles at election times is the pretense of piety on the part of people running for office.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Running, People, Office

  Source: www.npr.org

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