Top 100 Quotes About Pretense
#1. Give your heart to everybody you meet. The rest is pretense.
Ethan Hawke
#2. Have you ever considered making at least a pretense of humility, Mr. Hunt? Just for the sake of politeness?
"I don't believe in false modesty."
"People might like you more if you did."
"Would you?
Lisa Kleypas
#3. Nothing is more abhorrent to me than sugary-sweet photography full of pretense, poses, and gimmickry. For this reason, I have allowed myself to tell the truth about our times and people in a sincere manner.
August Sander
#4. In the war room, love? What if someone comes in?"
I stood and removed his shirt. "Then they'll have a good story to tell."
"Good?" He adopted the pretense of being offended.
"Prove me wrong.
Maria V. Snyder
#5. It would be futile to attempt to fit women into a masculine pattern of attitudes, skills and abilities and disastrous to force them to suppress their specifically female characteristics and abilities by keeping up the pretense that there are no differences between the sexes.
Arianna Huffington
#6. Let me think
Thinking is all I have
If wisdom is a pretense
Then let me pretend to be wise
Walter Dean Myers
#7. I ask every Communist individually to set an example, by deeds and without pretense, a real example worthy of a man and a Communist, in restoring order, starting normal life, in resuming work and production, and in laying the foundations of an ordered life.
Janos Kadar
#8. He who has a mind to do mischief will always find a pretense.
Publilius Syrus
#9. Brandon was a natural at whatever he put his mind to. It was one of the things that made him so attractive. That and his complete lack of pretense. He was brilliant, but didn't brag, popular, but not cliquish, comfortable in his skin, and utterly forthright about his needs and desires.
Diana Peterfreund
#10. Comics, at least in periodical form, exist almost entirely free of any pretense; the critical world of art hardly touches them, and they're 100% personal.
Chris Ware
#11. Biblical spirituality means powerlessness, living without embellishment or pretense, free to be faithful in the gospel, and free from anxiety about effectiveness or similar illusions of success.
William Stringfellow
#12. There is no worse sickness for the soul, o you who are proud, than this pretense of perfection.
Rumi
#13. In my work, I present questions and concerns. [It's] the opportunity to put a system of antibodies into circulation, without any pretense of making the world a better place, but to start a conversation with the world.
Paolo Pellegrin
#14. How detestable, I ask you, is this madness: that man, finding God in his body and soul a hundred times, on this very pretense of excellence denies that there is a God?
John Calvin
#15. What condemnation could possibly be more harsh than one's own, when self-pretense is no longer possible?
Richard Matheson
#16. 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
#17. The only thing more dangerous than ignorance is the pretense of intelligent ignorance. The former is teachable; the latter is not.
Criss Jami
#18. 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
#19. One of the most repellent spectacles at election times is the pretense of piety on the part of people running for office.
Christopher Hitchens
#20. 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
#21. Most every charge you level at American capitalism applies with equal force to communism, with this nice difference, that the Reds make no pretense at such frivolities as civil liberties or environmentalism. The differences in degree are so great that they result in a radical difference in kind.
Edward Abbey
#22. Prince Hippolyte, under pretense of helping, was in everyone's way.
Leo Tolstoy
#23. If the state polls are right, then Mr. Obama will win the Electoral College. If you can't acknowledge that after a day when Mr. Obama leads 19 out of 20 swing-state polls, then you should abandon the pretense that your goal is to inform rather than entertain the public.
Nate Silver
#25. Many times Christians state their love for the Lord and their willingness to die for Him. I will make no pretense of knowing the Lord's will in your life, but I do feel that in most cases the Lord is far more interested in our living for Him than He is in our dying for Him.
Zig Ziglar
#26. I know you don't think that any tongue I speak is mine; it must be rented. I am always denial, or pretense. A child born mid-flight has no nation. I can pull on either culture, but they always melt like a dream, trickle away, water on the oiled pelt of foreign.
Jasmine Ann Cooray
#27. Media manipulation in the U.S. today is more efficient than it was in Nazi Germany, because here we have the pretense that we are getting all the information we want. That misconception prevents people from even looking for the truth.
Mark Crispin Miller
#28. Rather than rewriting the law under the pretense of interpreting it, the Court should have left it to Congress to decide what to do about the Act's limitation of tax credits to state Exchanges.
Antonin Scalia
#29. I would act, pretend, and the pretense would become real.
Susan Hill
#30. 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
#31. The pretense that the workings of the mind, like the actions of the body, are subject to the control of laws, does not seem sufficiently demolished ... The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others.
Thomas Jefferson
#32. There is more hope in honest brokenness than in the pretense of false wholeness.
Jamie Arpin-Ricci
#33. And this is what has taken place. The delusion of the day is to enrich all classes at the expense of each other; it is to generalize plunder under pretense of organizing it.
Frederic Bastiat
#34. Keep his pants on or take them off? Better keep them on for now, or the whole massage pretense might vanish before it began.
Nina Croft
#35. It is high time that the American people should remember a few home truths, and that we should refuse to become partners with a militarism which is still stalking unchecked under the pretense of national needs and of international justice.
Elisabeth Marbury
#36. A Woman in harmony with her spirit
is like a river flowing.
She goes where she will without pretense and arrives at her destination
prepared to be herself
and only herself
Maya Angelou
#37. No, she lies. Because she's polite enough to know that if someone gives you a book, you owe that person the pretense that you haven't read it.
Fredrik Backman
#38. Governments are bigger than ever, but under neoliberalism they have far less pretense to being concerned with addressing non-corporate interests. And
Noam Chomsky
#39. To copy beauty forfeits all pretense to fame; to copy faults is want of sense.
Charles Churchill
#40. I make no pretense to accuracy. I shall be quite content if the sensibilities of no one are wounded by anything I may reduce to type.
Thomas R. Marshall
#41. It's way too easy to see the real face of a person. They're amiable and full of pretense when they want something from you, but the minute you don't give in, back away or put yourself first (like they do) is the minute they show you who they really are.
Donna Lynn Hope
#42. Totally self-reliant, he is a master negotiator. He believes no one, expects the worst of people, distrusts his allies and adversaries alike and makes no pretense at intimacy.
Mark Stevens
#43. It's a dangerous thing, pretense. A man ought to know who he is, even if he isn't proud to be it.
Daniel Polansky
#44. It seems to me that socialists today can preserve their position in academic economics merely by the pretense that the differences are entirely moral questions about which science cannot decide.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#45. Men make this great pretense of not wanting to be caught, but in the end they usually beg for a lady's hand.
Elizabeth Boyle
#46. The bully mind is not capable of loving or respecting others nor can it love or respect itself. Life's subtleties and the means of survival require its pretense of both these qualities.
Rick Stein
#47. 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
#48. (Sarah Palin's) greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman.
Wendy Doniger
#49. 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
#50. Whenever A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.
H.L. Mencken
#51. The protection of the masses has in all times been the pretense of tyranny - the plea of monarchy, of aristocracy, of special privilege of every kind. The slave owners justified slavery as protecting the slaves.
Henry George
#53. The pretentiousness of literature really annoys me; the way a writer is held as this sort of magical person to be revered on the stage. Everything I do on tour is to try and destroy that pretense.
Chuck Palahniuk
#54. I'd been in Sacramento a day and already noticed the pervasiveness of its homeless problem. The city seemed like California without the masks or pretense: a place where dreams were occasionally made but mostly torn apart.
Tom Bissell
#55. Competence in heterosexuality, or at least the appearance or pretense of such competence, is as much a public affair as a privateone. Thus, going steady is a high school diploma in heterosexuality; engagement a BA; marriage an MA; and children a Ph.D.
Thomas Szasz
#56. In fact, when I met Kit Harington first, he was pretty much feeling how I'm feeling today - at a photo shoot and you've had no sleep. He was just a really nice, English, down-to-earth guy. No pretense, nothing.
Max Irons
#57. I predict future happiness for Americans, if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.
Thomas Jefferson
#58. Perfection I've lived with the pretense of perfection for seventeen years. Give my room a cursory inspection, you'd think I have OCD. But it's only habit and not obsession that keeps it all orderly. Of course, I don't want to give the impression that it's all up to me.
Ellen Hopkins
#59. The insolent civility of a proud man is, if possible, more shocking than his rudeness could be; because he shows you, by his manner, that he thinks it mere condescension in him; and that his goodness alone bestows upon you what you have no pretense to claim.
Lord Chesterfield
#60. Children, I always think, are just putting on a performance of being naive and not understanding anything. I have worked with children in films, and they're treated as adults and they just drop the pretense of being children.
Wallace Shawn
#61. If no one else, the dying must notice how unreal, how full of pretense, is all that we accomplish here, where nothing is allowed to be itself.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#62. Philosophizing is simply one way of being afraid, a cowardly pretense that doesn't get you anywhere.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#63. Too, if you're a true contemplative, your life and words will overflow with spiritual wisdom, compassion, and fruitful insight, because you're sure to measure out what you say carefully and calmly, eschewing lies and speaking without the shrill pretense of hypocrites.
Anonymous
#64. 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
#65. Why not remove his desk, bring in a treadmill, hang a carrot from the ceiling and stop all pretense already.
Colson Whitehead
#66. When did you know?"
I watched him take a breath, and with it all pretense fell away. All his walls, all his cleverness, all his grandstanding and pretending. He looked vulnerable, and it made my chest ache.
"When I saw you ...
Penny Reid
#67. No ... " said Professor Quirrell. "That is not why I am here. You have made no effort to hide your dislike for me, Miss Granger. I thank you for that lack of pretense, for I much prefer true hate to false love.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#68. I believe 100% when your heart & mind are in the right place and there is no pretense, great things will come. It's that simple!
Jimmy Wayne
#69. Hahaha!!!...I wish this veil of pretense could hide my habit of dodging quotes but dissapointingly,it doesn't,which is why,I know none yet.
Ayesha Harruna Attah
#70. 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
#71. The insight that peace is the end of war, and that therefore a war is the preparation for peace, is at least as old as Aristotle, and the pretense that the aim of an armament race is to guard the peace is even older, namely as old as the discovery of propaganda lies.
Hannah Arendt
#72. I have a lot of friends who I really feel like I can kick back with and let all pretense go and be very comfortable with.
Olivia Wilde
#73. I live there...
where the birds are infinite
everywhere
where they flee
it's a place your eyes can wander
but never see
Where everyone accepts me,
Without any pretense
It's a place your mind can picture
but never really comprehend.
Sanober Khan
#74. Most of the confidence which I appear to feel, especially when influenced by noon wine, is only a pretense.
Tennessee Williams
#75. A veil of pretense can definitely conceal your dumbness but then it assures the proliferation of your dumbness instead of stagnating it by seeking knowledge from others.
Ayesha
#76. No pretense stop wasting my time. A virtuous woman is really hard to find.
Buju Banton
#77. One may wonder indeed whether the pretense of superior health is not itself rapidly becoming a mental aberration.
Rene Dubos
#78. [T]he vast regulatory structure the federal government has erected in the name of the commerce power cannot be ended overnight, in many cases, but the pretense that such programs are constitutional can be ended, even as the programs themselves are phased out over time.
Roger Pilon
#79. Sunil rarely got angry when he discovered the secret reasons behind the ways people behaved. Having a sense of how the world operated, beyond its pretense, seemed to him an armoring thing.
Katherine Boo
#80. The ultimate self-effacement
is not the pretense of the minimal,
but the jocular considerations of the maximal
in the manner of Wallace Stevens.
Mark Strand
#81. Fraud includes the pretense of knowledge when knowledge there is none.
Benjamin Cardozo
#82. 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
#83. After we passed a few more houses, the street ceased to mantain any pretense of urbanity, like a man returning to his little village who, piece by piece, strips off his Sunday best, slowly changing back into a peasant as he gets closer to his home.
Bruno Schulz
#84. Any account of science which does not explicitly describe it as something we believe in is essentially incomplete and a false pretense. It amounts to a claim that science is essentially different from and superior to all human beliefs that are not scientific statements
and this is untrue.
Richard Rhodes
#85. How can one be pleasing to God when one is inflated with pride and self-love under the pretense of striving for Gods glory, while in fact one is seeking ones own glory?
Mary Faustina Kowalska
#86. Frankly - and believe me, I say this without any pretense - when I see the road I've taken, I have to say that thanks to good luck, because without good luck one can do nothing, I've come out pretty well.
James MacArthur
#87. When a man practices biblical openness with other men, he moves from secrecy to candor, from isolation to connection, and from pretense to authenticity.
Stephen Arterburn
#88. Part of the doctrinal system in the United States is the pretense that we're all a happy family, there are no class divisions, and everybody is working together in harmony. But that's radically false.
Noam Chomsky
#89. Be niggards of advice on no pretense; For the worst avarice is that of sense.
Alexander Pope
#90. One of the easiest forms of pretense to break down is the pretense of enthusiasm for exotic foods. Just bring on the exotic foods.
Robert Benchley
#91. Your pretense does not fool me, gnome. My eye will be upon you.
Cassandra Clare
#92. So much of my life has been about self-effacement, pretense, masquerading, concealment, and indirection.
Marlon Riggs
#93. I don't like bullshit and pretense.
I can't enjoy the joy at church ...
without some cash in my wallet.
Toba Beta
#94. I think making a pretense of civility toward Eric Alterman is like making a pretense of civility to a scorpion.
John Podhoretz
#95. War does not only kill soldiers and warriors. It also kills rules and moral values. No! Those cannot be killed. War kills the pretense at rules and moral values. It also kills the pretense of being human beings...
Sweety Shinde
#96. 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.
#97. One of the worst symptoms of HIV is secrecy...if you get HIV? You get secretive. Insular. Paranoid. Your life becomes a giant pretense so no one finds out you have this disease. You don't know what people will do for you because you are too afraid to tell them.
Regan Hofmann
#99. Prudishness is pretense of innocence without innocence. Women have to remain prudish as long as men are sentimental, dense, and evil enough to demand of them eternal innocence and lack of education. For innocence is the only thing which can ennoble lack of education.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#100. Now hell and heaven grapple on our backs and all our old pretense is ripped away. Aye, and God's icy wind will blow.
Arthur Miller
