Pretenses Quotes

#1. I don't do interviews under false pretenses.

Tom Stoppard

#2. Am discovering her pretenses. She is always smiling, gay, but underneath she feels unreal, remote, detached from experience. She acts as if she were asleep. She is trying to awaken by falling into bed with anyone who invites her.

Anais Nin

#3. 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

#4. By 1911 I found it impossible to continue my pretenses to orthodoxy;

Will Durant

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

Emma Goldman

#6. People defend nothing more violently than the pretenses they live by.

Allen Drury

#7. If the authorities under various false pretenses, continue curtailing the rights of citizens, so that they merely become serfs to a handful of multinational companies, a global rebellion of ordinary people against super capitalism is certainly not inconceivable.

A.J. Beirens

#8. Say what you want to say about the rest of his presidency, including his tone-deaf response to Katrina and a war waged in Iraq on false pretenses, Bush connected with Americans in the aftermath of 9/11 because he looked as frail and unforgiving as we felt.

Ron Fournier

#9. If there is no hell, a good many preachers are obtaining money under false pretenses.

Billy Sunday

#10. Afternoon tea needn't stand on ceremony. Anything that becomes more important than sweet fellowship, whether lace or linen or the china itself, is pretense. How much more we enjoy life when the pretenses are discarded!

Paul F. Kortepeter

#11. There are pretenses which are very sincere, and marriage is their school.

Miguel De Unamuno

#12. The easiest and cheapest trick for any leader is to take his country to war on false pretenses.

John Le Carre

#13. 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

#14. Despite all of our pretenses and fantasies, we always have been and will remain a biological species tied to this particular biological world. Millions of years of evolution are indelibly encoded in our genes. History without the wildlands is no history at all.

Edward O. Wilson

#15. I will never again go to people under false pretenses even if it is to give them the Holy Bible. I will never again sell anything, even if I have to starve. I am going home now and I will sit down and really write about people.

Henry Miller

#16. She hated seeing monsters smile. Monsters should growl and snarl and be done with the pretenses.

Faith McKay

#17. Men wholly bent on wordly treasures were the dupes of their own passions, rather than deceived by the writings or pretenses of those who claimed to be Alchemists.

Ethan A. Hitchcock

#18. In America, after 9/11, and after the death of bin Laden, and after two wars, one of them fought, a lot of people think, on false pretenses, and definitely post the Patriot Act, there are a lot of these questions about what can we do to our citizens in order to prevent the next attack.

Gideon Raff

#19. Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.

Eric Hoffer

#20. But is it really you
behind the pretenses
beyond dust and distances
beneath the salt and the siren
announcements and ancient
impurities and decays
that claim to be you

W.S. Merwin

#21. The chief difference between free capitalism and State socialism seems to be this: that under the former a man pursues his own advantage openly, frankly and honestly, whereas under the latter he does so hypocritically and under false pretenses.

H.L. Mencken

#22. I don't want to inhabit the human world under false pretenses.

Janet Frame

#23. 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

#24. We had given in to our vulnerability and cast down any pretenses that we were too strong to be weak.

Kellie Thacker

#25. Home is the place where you are most thoroughly yourself, with no pretenses.

Victoria Moran

#26. BDSM is about dropping the pretenses; I want you completely exposed.

Sierra Cartwright

#27. Regardless of all our pretenses, deep within, we are still unconsciously the same old cave-people.

Abhijit Naskar

#28. Religion either makes men wise and virtuous, or it makes them set up false pretenses to both.

William Hazlitt

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

C.E. Murphy

#30. War: A wretched debasement of all the pretenses of civilization.

Omar N. Bradley

#31. She stares in my eyes and loves me with a vehemence all her own. A scary, passionate type of love. One that rips away all pretenses and allows us to love each other bare and without consequence.

Alessandra Torre

#32. The 1143-year-long war hand begun on false pretenses and only because the two races were unable to communicate.
Once they could talk, the first question was 'Why did you start this thing?' and the answer was 'Me?

Joe Haldeman

#33. The actions of yesterday, the pretenses of tomorrow, and the presence of now, have forever added to history.

Brandy Nacole

#34. Sex is full of lies. The body tries to tell the truth. But, it's usually too battered with rules to be heard, and bound with pretenses so it can hardly move. We cripple ourselves with lies.

Jim Morrison

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

Audre Lorde

#36. The crafty person is always in danger; and when they think they walk in the dark, all their pretenses are transparent.

John Tillotson

#37. She eyed him steadily, wondering at his sudden ... humanity. Maybe dying did away with the usual games, the pretenses of the living dance.

Steven Erikson

#38. My mind swirled with memories of the life I had led. The constant struggle to keep up appearances, the pretenses, the smiles that had been met with tears. The long sleepless nights, the loneliness that cloaked my spirit and turned me into a true ghost.

Anchee Min

#39. High finance isn't burglary or obtaining money by false pretenses, but rather a judicious selection from the best features of those fine arts.

Finley Peter Dunne

#40. In careless ignorance they think it civilization, when in reality it is a portion of their slavery ... To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false pretenses, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.

Tacitus

#41. Music is the one thing in which there is no use trying to deceive others or make false pretenses.

Confucius

#42. When you write a book there are no more pretenses or facades to hide behind. It is very liberating to proclaim "this is who I am.

Jonathan Heatt

#43. We assume that others are receiving the kind of appreciation we want for ourselves, and we proceed on the assumption that since we are not loveable as we are, we must become lovable under false pretenses, as if we were something better than we are.

Thomas Merton

#44. This world is filled with loud pretenses, sound republics, blind kingdoms, all bare and out of sorts.

Dew Platt

#45. Man was entering under false pretenses the sphere of incredible facilities, acquired too cheaply, below cost price, almost for nothing, and the disproportion between outlay and gain, the obvious fraud on nature, the excessive payment for a trick of genius, had to be offset by self-parody.

Bruno Schulz

#46. People say things die in winter, but it isn't true, mostly. They just gather their strength.

Rose Lerner

#47. Secrets are my profession. I know them inside and out. What separates me from someone I'm lying to isn't the lie. It's that I know I'm lying. It's a pane of glass---they can't see it, but I don't forget it's there.

Rose Lerner

#48. People liked to imagine their feelings were obvious, that their emotions were written all over their face. But generally, no one looked carefully enough to notice anything, or knew you well enough to understand what they noticed.

Rose Lerner

#49. Drek. He was definitely in love with her now.

Rose Lerner

#50. The human heart is like a big mess of embroidery silks, and the more you pull, the more they tangle. The thing is, the threads have only got one end, if that. You can't sort them all out into colors. You just pick the ones you want and hold one to them as best you can.

Rose Lerner