Purports Quotes

#1. It's been unsettling to discover that every form of narrative, even one that purports to tell the truth, is a kind of lying.

Damon Galgut

#2. Between economic freedom and government regulation? Chapter 2 will address these issues. The specific question I ask is how far very complex regulation has become the disease of which it purports to be the cure, distorting and corrupting both the political and the economic process.

Niall Ferguson

#3. Violence is not to be undertaken by private persons. If a state or administration acts without due and visible attention to agreed international process, it acts in a way analogous to a private person. It purports to be judge of its own interest.

Rowan Williams

#4. I believe that the Welfare State redistributes poverty and reduces income. As Karl Kraus once said of psychoanalysis, the Welfare State is the disease which it purports to cure.

Arnold Kling

#5. Science reveals where religion conceals. Where religion purports to explain, it actually resorts to tautology. To assert that "God did it" is no more than an admission of ignorance dressed deceitfully as an explanation..

Peter Atkins

#6. Education, the great mumbo jumbo and fraud of the age purports to equip us to live and is prescribed as a universal remedy for everything from juvenile delinquency to premature senility.

Malcolm Muggeridge

#7. Psychoanalysis is the mental illness it purports to cure

Karl Kraus

#8. That's what we both hate about fiction, or at least crappy fiction - it purports to provide occasions for thinking through complex issues, but really it has predetermined the positions, stuffed a narrative full of false choices, and hooked you on them, rendering you less able to see out, to get out.

Maggie Nelson

#9. One doesn't want to read badly any more than live badly, since time will not relent. I don't know that we owe God or nature a death, but nature will collect anyway, and we certainly owe mediocrity nothing, whatever collectivity it purports to advance or at least represent.

Harold Bloom

#10. It is a search for a mythical CO2 sink to explain an immeasurable CO2 lifetime to fit a hypothetical CO2 computer model that purports to show that an impossible amount of fossil fuel burning is heating the atmosphere. It is all a fiction.

Tom Segalstad

#11. Foucault's was a seductive image, one that helped to make him famous and to attract legions of disciples. But for all that, it remains a late 20th-century ideological construct, one with little or no contemporary relevance or resonance in the societies it purports to describe.

Andrew Scull

#12. To be sure, President Clinton reached an accord called "The Agreement" in 1994 that purports to address some of President Reagan's concerns.

Frank Gaffney

#13. Maybe the greatest hope of Christmas is that what it purports to be is exactly what it is.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

#14. I now find myself looking at every sentence, every image, that purports to tell the West about the Arabs and the Muslims with this question in mind: to what extent does it feed into existing stereotypes and established prejudice?

Ahdaf Soueif

#15. Even though I was making documentaries, my films had fictional elements to them. I think I like blurring those distinctions because so much of what we see on television purports to be the truth, but it's often largely imaginary - or wishful thinking, or any number of less honorable things.

Ruth Ozeki

#16. The desire to be desire-less is but another desire. The thought that, because this desire purports to be spiritual, it is superior to more mundane desires shows how skilled the mind is at justifying any desire it is attached to.

Joel Kramer

#17. I saved you," Andersen said at last, slowly but firmly, like Pat was an idiot child who had to be reminded of the basic rules of the universe. To wit: Gravity exists. Time purports to flow in a linear fashion, but it's only trying to fool us. I saved you.

Alex Gabriel

#18. The principle of always seeking an alternative applies to nonviolence as well. It is this: If nonviolence is to be credible, it must answer the questions that violence purports to answer, but in a better way.

Jim Wallis

#19. For a man who purports to have learned of media ethics only this month, Mr. Williams has spent an undue amount of time appearing as a media ethicist on both CNN and the cable news networks of NBC.

Frank Rich

#20. The subject under discussion, economics, purports to be a science. It

John Lanchester

#21. It is true that religions could not exist if the whole human race understood that God doesn't have preferences, because a religion purports to be a statement of God's preferences.

Neale Donald Walsch

#22. The state always poses a greater threat to society than whatever problem it purports to solve.

Llewellyn Rockwell

#23. The concept of "social justice," which purports to promote equality among the lines of gender and ethnicity, is based on intersectional feminist theory. Per the theory, certain classes of people are naturally oppressors, while others are victims. There's nothing more divisive than that.

Ian Miles Cheong

#24. The problem with the Mindset of a fair Democracy is that it purports to be a fair and trustworthy system, but history shows clearly how the voters' trust has been constantly abused.

Tony Dovale

#25. The Constitution was framed fundamentally as a bulwark against governmental power, and preventing the arbitrary administration of punishment is a basic ideal of any society that purports to be governed by the rule of law.

William J. Brennan

#26. The aim ... is to provide a clear and rigorous basis for determining when a causal ordering can be said to hold between two variables or groups of variables in a model ... The concepts refer to a model-a system of equations-and not to the 'real' world the model purports to describe.

Herbert Simon

#27. Inverted totalitarianism, unlike classical totalitarianism, does not revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds expression in the anonymity of the Corporate State. It purports to cherish democracy, patriotism, and the Constitution while manipulating internal levers.

Chris Hedges

#28. Just as communism always begins with an appeal to "humanity" and equality" and ends with inhuman despotism, so does fascism always begin with an appeal to "nationalism" and "individualism," and ends with a military collectivism far worse than the disease it purports to cure.

Sydney J. Harris

#29. The Book of Mormon is true, just what it purports to be, and for this testimony I expect to give an account in the day of judgment.

Joseph Smith Jr.

#30. Any gospel which purports to save people without also transforming them is inviting easy-believism. If you think being a Christian is nothing more than saying a prayer or joining a church, then you've confused real grace with cheap grace. Those who are justified will be sanctified.

Kevin DeYoung

#31. We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express.

A.J. Ayer

#32. If a theory purports to explain everything, then it is likely not explaining much at all.

Massimo Pigliucci