Pretense Quotes - Page 9

• LEXICOGRAPHER, n. A pestilent fellow who, under the pretense of recording some particular stage in the development of a language, does what he can to arrest its growth, stiffen its flexibility and mechanize its methods.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Growth, Lexicographer, Doe

  Ambrose Bierce (2013). “The Devil's Dictionary: Complete & Unabridged”, p.147, Courier Corporation

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• It is said slavery is all we are fighting for, and if we give it up we give up all. Even if this were true, which we deny, slavery is not all our enemies are fighting for. It is merely the pretense to establish sectional superiority and a more centralized form of government, and to deprive us of our rights and liberties.

  Patrick Cleburne

  Giving Up, War, Military

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• I think we have deluded ourselves into believing that people don't know that abortion is killing. So any pretense that abortion is not killing is a signal of our ambivalence, a signal that we cannot say yes, it kills a fetus.

  Faye Wattleton

  Believe, Thinking, People

  "In Their Own Words: Pro-Lifers Aren’t the Only Ones Who Call Abortion Killing". townhall.com. November 30, 2015.

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• Certainly the best times were when I was alone with mathematics, free of ambition and pretense, and indifferent to the world.

  Robert Langlands

  Ambition, World, Mathematics

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• Who does not feel that Nansen's account of his search for the Pole rather loses than gains in ideal satisfaction by the pretense of a few trifling acquisitions for science?

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  Satisfaction, Gains, Doe

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• all government, whatever its forms or pretenses, is a dead weight that paralyzes the free spirit and activities of the masses.

  Emma Goldman

  Government, Free Spirit, Weight

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• pretense is the oil that lubricates society.

  Mary Roberts Rinehart

  Oil

  Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb, Mary Roberts Rinehart (2011). “Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are: And Isn't that Just Like a Man”, p.31, The Floating Press

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• the essence of vulgarity seemed to lie in the pretence at being or the attempt to be, something that one really was not, with the resulting lack of ease and dignity and taste.

  Ann Bridge

  Lying, Essence, Taste

  Ann Bridge (2013). “Singing Waters”, p.9, A&C Black

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• We are tired of the pretense that we have special privileges and the reality that we have none; of the fiction that we are queens, and the fact that we are subjects.

  Lillie Devereux Blake

  Queens, Tired, Reality

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• We cannot settle for the pretenses of connection, or for the parodies of self-love.

  Audre Lorde

  Self, Connections, Settling

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• Churches are tax exempt because they are supposed to provide a public good. To prove that good to the IRS, churches arent supposed to hoard their money. They are supposed to spend it on goods and services for the faithful. Under this pretense, the church has made massive investments in tax free real estate all over the world. And when it comes to labor costs, they are almost free.

  Lawrence Wright

  Real, Faithful, Church

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• Because the church has moved away from the gospel anytime you move away from the gospel, you at the same time move toward pretense, you move toward image-keeping, you move toward the need to pretend.

  Tullian Tchividjian

  Moving, Church, Needs

  Source: www.christianpost.com

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• I think it started to feel like home when I stopped maintaining any pretense that I was ever going to be in the movie business. I went there like many writers - I had a screenplay deal and I would go to these meetings and it was the typical thing. And I hated it. I was not interested in writing screenplays, actually. But I kept feeling like that was what I was supposed to do. It was just this horrible cognitive dissonance.

  Meghan Daum

  Home, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• My aim is to lay bare and proclaim the crying and horrible guilt of the bloody doctrine of persecution as one of the most seditious, destructive, blasphemous, and bloodiest in any or all the nations of the world, notwithstanding the many fine veils, pretenses, and colors of not persecuting Christ Jesus, but heretics; not God's truth or servants, but blasphemers and seducers; not persecuting men for their conscience, but for sinning against their conscience; and like specious reasonings to justify the cruelty of intolerance.

  Roger Williams

  Jesus, Men, Color

  Source: www.libertymagazine.org

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• It is impossible not to bestow the imputation of deliberate imposture and deception upon the gross pretense of a similitude between a king of Great Britain and a magistrate of the character marked out for that of the President of the United States. It is still more impossible to withhold that imputation from the rash and barefaced expedients which have been employed to give success to the attempted imposition.

  Alexander Hamilton

  Kings, Character, Giving

  Source: www.foxnews.com

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• It's useful to be born in a different culture because you see things that are not obvious. I come from France. In France, there isn't a pretense of objectivity in publishing. I discovered - and I don't agree with it - that in the US, the New York Times or The New Yorker has to pretend to be objective, and if they present this point of view then they have to also present the other side.

  Francoise Mouly

  Different, Culture, Obvious

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• No pretense stop wasting my time. A virtuous woman is really hard to find.

  Buju Banton

  Wasting My Time, Virtuous Woman, Hard

  Song: I Wanna Be Loved, Album: 'Til Shiloh, 1995

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• We talked, she and I. She asked about my work and it was a pretense, she was not interested in my work. And when I answered, it was a pretense. I was not interested in my work either. There was only one thing that interested us, and she knew it. She had made it plain by her coming.

  John Fante

  Made, Not Interested, One Thing

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• What is leadership, after all, but the blind choice of one route over another and the confident pretense that the decision was based on reason

  Robert Harris

  Leadership, Choices, Decision

  Robert Harris (2003). “Pompeii”, Vintage

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• I don't wish to inhabit the human world under false pretences.

  Janet Frame

  World, Want, Humans

  "Towards Another Summer".

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• Civilisation is only a pretense. In crisis we have become mere apes again, forgetting the rational biped of our pretensions and instead becoming the hairy primate at the mouth of the cave, screeching at the enemy wishing it would go away, fingering the heavy stone we will use the moment it comes close enough

  Orson Scott Card

  Enemy, Going Away, Wish

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• Now of all the idealist abominations that make society pestiferous I doubt if there be any so mean as that of forcing self-sacrifice on a woman under the pretense that she likes it.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Mean, Sacrifice, Self

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• I love Renée Zellweger, she can do no wrong in my eyes. I relate to every character she embodies, because she has no pretense. I also love Amy Adams: She's so kind and talented, and whenever I watch her I think, I want to be her friend-I've seen Enchanted many times with my daughter. Meryl Streep, of course. And I love what Cate Blanchett brings to every movie she does.

  Katie Holmes

  Daughter, Character, Eye

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• Any large extension of the Government into business affairs - no matter what the pretense and no matter how the the extension is labeled - will be bound to promote waste and put a curb on our prosperity and progress.

  Thomas A. Edison

  Government, Progress, Matter

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• ... I prefer true but imperfect knowledge, even if it leaves much undetermined and unpredictable, to a pretense of exact knowledge that is likely to be false.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Imperfect, Unpredictable, Ifs

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