Top 100 Quotes About Pretensions
#1. Religious fermentation is always a symptom of the intellectual vigor of a society; and it is only when they forget that they are hypotheses and put on rationalistic and authoritative pretensions, that our faiths do harm.
William James
#2. A man who cannot control his temper is not very likely to control his passions, and no matter what his pretensions in religion, he moves in daily life very close to the animal plane.
David O. McKay
#3. THE COMPUTER IS JUST AN INSTRUMENT for doing faster what we already know how to do slower. All pretensions to computer intelligence and paradise-tomorrow promises should be toned down before the public turns away in disgust. And if that should happen, our civilization might not survive.
Gian-Carlo Rota
#4. Nearly everywhere monarchs raised themselves further above the level of the greatest nobles and buttressed their new pretensions to respect and authority with cannons and taxation.
J.M. Roberts
#5. Most cats don't like water, and despite her pretensions of tigerhood, Julie was no different. Yes, tigers have stripes; so do tabbies. If you want to know the difference, try tossing one of each into your swimming pool. Then I would recommend running.
Seanan McGuire
#6. To the Public, for the indulgent ear it has inclined to a plain tale with few pretensions.
Charlotte Bronte
#7. Whenever two unbelievers quarrel, the may both say some very insightful things about the unsightly habits of the other.
The postmodernists are very good at pointing out the pretensions of the modernists. And the modernists are very good at pointing out the incoherence of the postmodernists.
Douglas Wilson
#8. Good God, is the man a heathen?'
'Worse, a capitalist with pretensions of culture.
Melanie Jackson
#9. Science can explain what exists in the world, how things work, and what might be in the future. By definition, it has no pretensions to knowing what should be in the future. Only religions and ideologies seek to answer such questions.
Yuval Noah Harari
#10. True glory strikes root, and even extends itself; all false pretensions fall as do flowers, nor can any feigned thing be lasting.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#11. What do I not owe you! You taught me a lesson, hard indeed at first, but most advantageous. By you, I was properly humbled. I came to you without a doubt of my reception. You showed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased. - Darcy
Jane Austen
#12. Our treatment of animals and our attitude toward them are crucial not only to any pretensions we have to ethical behavior but the humankind's intellectual and moral evolution. Which is how the human animal is meant to evolve, isn't it?
Joy Williams
#13. Having nothing to do, I am correcting the Paris edition of Bach; not only the engraver's mistakes, but also the mistakes hallowed by those who are supposed to understand Bach (I have no pretensions to understand better, but I do think that sometimes I can guess).
Frederic Chopin
#14. What encouragement the apostle holds out to us. O my friends, that we might leave all our pretensions, and come to the truth in our own hearts.
Elias Hicks
#15. If you try to go beyond your interests just for the sake of pretensions or wealth, your art becomes less legitimate.
Vincent D'Onofrio
#16. There is more jealousy between rival wits than rival beauties, for vanity has no sex. But in both cases there must be pretensions, or there will be no jealousy.
Charles Caleb Colton
#17. There is nothing finer in the world than the telling of tales. Split atoms if you wish, but splitting an infinitive-and getting away with it-is far nobler. Lance boils if you wish, but pricking pretensions is often cleaner and always more fun.
Greg Bear
#18. Pretensions to moral superiority are devastatingly destructive.
Mary Douglas
#19. And as I looked, it became very clear that this five-and-ten-cent ship was in some way connected with human pretensions. This suffocating interior of a dime-store ship was my own personal self; these gimcrack mobiles of tin and plastic were my personal contributions to the universe.
Aldous Huxley
#21. Fighting battles is like courting girls: those who make the most pretensions and are boldest usually win.
Rutherford B. Hayes
#22. What is a harp but an oversized cheese slicer with cultural pretensions?
Denis Norden
#23. As a Christian, I'm passionately opposed to American pretensions that we have special standing with God; to political office-seekers who play on our religious differences; and to the religious arrogance that says, 'Our truth is the only truth.'
Parker Palmer
#24. You showed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased.
Jane Austen
#25. Unnatural, unorthodox, amoral: those pretensions crumble when confronted by true happiness. You shouldn't give another the authority to draw a line defining the boundaries of acceptable joy.
Darrell Drake
#26. People. Falling for each others' pretensions, fakeness and whatever various faces they can put on to wear. And then they call it love. What a fantasy. What a blasphemy. Humanity bores me.
C. JoyBell C.
#27. When we are aware of our inner-growth potential yet have no pretensions about ourselves, when we are vulnerable, then we can change.
Amit Goswami
#28. As I grew up I developed some literary pretensions myself, and studied and wrote meticulous poetry informed by poets as diverse as T. S. Eliot, Rimbaud, and Judy Grahn.
Jo Weldon
#29. Life is a conspiracy to shower you with a nonstop feast of interesting experiences, all of which are designed to help you grow your intelligence, shed your pretensions, and master the art of ingenious love.
Rob Brezsny
#30. To a superior race of being the pretensions of mankind to extraordinary sanctity and virtue must seem ... ridiculous.
William Hazlitt
#31. Is psychiatry a medical enterprise concerned with treating diseases, or a humanistic enterprise concerned with helping persons with their personal problems? Psychiatry could be one or the other, but it cannot
despite the pretensions and protestations of psichiatrists
be both.
Thomas Szasz
#32. There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment and expose the pretensions of tyrants and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant. And that is the force of human freedom.
George W. Bush
#34. The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labour in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.
Frederic Raphael
#35. But as the clerical pretensions are more exacting than all others, being put forward with an assertion that no answer is possible without breach of duty and sin, so are they more galling.
Anthony Trollope
#36. The first, that their pretensions to this possession of an art properly so called in their art of speaking are entirely unfounded; and the second, that they are involved in a profound mistake in their confusion of the good with the pleasant.
Friedrich Schleiermacher
#37. A person only experiences the fathomlessly beautiful and mysterious particulars that constitute reality by giving up the distorting spectacles of our egotistical appetites and repulsive pretensions, shedding artificial attachments, living without grand illusions, and free of deceptive delusions.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#38. Beneath our clothes, our reputations, our pretensions, beneath our religion or lack of it, we are all vulnerable both to the storm without and the storm within.
Frederick Buechner
#39. I always liked to write and had fun writing, but I didn't have any pretensions about being a writer. I liked to read and liked to putz around and write little stories or poems, but my thing was sports.
John Edgar Wideman
#40. Every photograph is a fiction with pretensions to truth. Despite everything that we have been inculcated, all that we believe, photography always lies; it lies instinctively, lies because its nature does not allow it to do anything else.
Joan Fontcuberta
#41. A nation riven by factions, in which the minority has no hope of ever becoming a majority, or in which some group knows it is perpetually outcast, will seem oppressive to its members, whatever the legal pretensions.
Henry A. Kissinger
#42. And it was always
without pretensions of loving or being loved although always in the hope of
finding something that resembled love but without the problems of love.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#43. Unlike most women I have known, she placed no value on shallow pretensions or hypocritical displays of gentility.
Pat Conroy
#44. Honor is truly sacred, but holds a lower rank in the scale of moral excellence than virtue. Indeed the former is part of the latter, and consequently has not equal pretensions to support a frame of government productive of human happiness.
John Adams
#45. If they wish to alleviate the sufferings of the exploited classes, let them live up to their pretensions, let them abandon the academy and go out there and work politically and economically and in a humanitarian spirit.
Harold Bloom
#46. I have strengths, and I have weaknesses. I don't pretend to be able to write a great thesis or doctorate - I have no pretensions in that direction.
Bob Ainsworth
#47. I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#48. What both the state and the capitalist economy oppose is an understanding of what might be called "the true nature of things" (using the phrase without metaphysical pretensions), especially injustices and exploitative practices.
Richard A. Falk
#49. It was always a considerable annoyance to any Disc citizen with pretensions to culture that they were ruled by gods whose idea of an uplifting artistic experience was a musical doorbell..
Terry Pratchett
#50. Their pretensions are naked and vulnerable and for that reason, to me at least, rather charming.
Julian Fellowes
#51. And people turn to internet with the hope that in this virtual world, where real identity need not be disclosed, they will find someone before whom they could be their true self,without any pretensions and get an opportunity to release the pent-up emotions and feel light.
Chitralekha Paul
#52. Stripped of ethical rationalizations and philosophical pretensions, a crime is anything that a group in power chooses to prohibit.
Freda Adler
#53. With no pretensions of art, Viva Las Vegas, the new Elvis Presley vehicle, is about as pleasant and unimportant as a Banana Split.
Howard Thompson
#54. I wish Obama would focus on governing the United States and would forget his country's imperialist pretensions.
Hugo Chavez
#55. My personal peculiarities could not offend her since she was totally uninterested in my pretensions to be a person.
Iris Murdoch
#56. As a gentleman- assuming you still have some pretensions in that direction- of honor- again, perhaps presumptuous, but still supposing your passing acquaintance with the concept- it is your duty- I won't even trouble to speculate here, but remain naively hopeful- to protect those under your care.
Connie Brockway
#57. Psychoanalysis will fade away just as mesmerism and phrenology did, and for the same reason - its exploded pretensions will deprive it of recruits
Frederick Crews
#58. Unfortunately for our esteem, societies of the West are not known for their conduciveness to the surrender of pretensions, to the acceptance of age or fat, let alone poverty and obscurity.
Alain De Botton
#59. Love is an artful arrangement of artless pretensions, whereby we labor to appear innocent in what we desire to be most cunning.
Norm MacDonald
#60. Fear is in almost all cases a wretched instrument of government, and ought in particular never to be employed against any order of men who have the smallest pretensions to independency.
Adam Smith
#61. Vanity Fair is a very vain, wicked, foolish place, full of all sorts of humbugs and falsenesses and pretensions.
William Makepeace Thackeray
#62. I make no pretensions to 'objectivity,' a fraudulent concept in an era of industrialized and politicized science in which intellectual mercenaries too often serve power and greed, the ambitions of competing nation-states, or the requirements of commerce.
Hazel Henderson
#63. It strikes Werner just then as wondrously futile to build splendid buildings, to make music, to sing songs, to print huge books full of colorful birds in the face of the seismic, engulfing indifference of the world - what pretensions humans have!
Anthony Doerr
#64. Demolishing pretensions, especially worthy ones, is a hallmark of the baby boom.
P. J. O'Rourke
#65. Men indulge those opinions and practices that favor their pretensions.
Roger L'Estrange
#66. Let's live a lie for today.
You'll spin tales
and pretend to love me.
And I'll smile; you'll not realize it's fake
Then I'll pretend
your pretensions don't cause me pain.
Sreesha Divakaran
#67. Masterpieces, not always distinguished or distinguishable among all the works with pretensions to genius, are scattered about the world like warning notices in a mine field.
Andrei Tarkovsky
#68. The worst possible heritage to leave with children: high spiritual pretensions and low performance.
D. A. Carson
#69. Steeped like a teabag in aristocratic pretensions ...
Philip Roth
#70. American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant.
H.L. Mencken
#71. Man - despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication, and his many accomplishments - owes his existence to a six inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains.
Paul Harvey
#72. All the pretensions you make of attachment to your Master, and all the devout actions which you may perform, are no recompense for disobedience.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#73. The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform ... But it is likely to exert an indirect and reciprocal influence on science itself.
Ada Lovelace
#74. Despite its scientific
pretensions, economics still remains more of an art than a science
Robert Kuttner
#75. I grew up reading comic books, pulp books, mystery and science fiction and fantasy. I'm a geek; I make no pretensions otherwise. It's the stuff that I love writing about. I like creating worlds.
David S.Goyer
#76. The individual or the group which organizes any society, however social its intentions or pretensions, arrogates an inordinate portion of social privilege to itself.
Reinhold Niebuhr
#77. Whoever is writing in the United States is using the American Dream as an ironical pole of his story. People elsewhere tend to accept, to a far greater degree anyway, that the conditions of life are hostile to mans pretensions.
Arthur Miller
#78. We have always pretensions to fame which, in our own hearts, we know to be disputable.
Samuel Johnson
#79. The world is a collective madhouse, its inhabitants are merely faking sanity. It is critical to becoming aware of these aberrations, for pretensions can be the enemy of love.
John Astin
#80. I'm trying to read/edit my story as if I have no existing knowledge of the story, no investment in it, no sense of what Herculean effort went into writing page 23, no pretensions as to why the dull patch on page 4 is important for the fireworks that will happen on page 714.
George Saunders
#81. When I was 20, in 1957, and maybe you would say I was old enough to know better, but nevertheless, I was completely nuts about Buddy Holly. And I loved pop bands that had absolutely no intellectual pretensions whatsoever. I loved the Monkees.
Tom Stoppard
#82. A canvas that I have covered is worth more than a blank canvas. My pretensions go no further; that is my right to paint, my reason for painting.
Irving Stone
#83. Your worst and most dangerous enemy is the person that injures you under the pretensions of friendship.
Norm MacDonald
#84. Who, despite the pretensions of this society,
can sleep in it in peace when they know that it derives its mediocre pleasures from the work of millions of
dead souls?
Albert Camus
#85. I cannot pretend to do sculpture and make a woman the ridiculous pedestal of my pretensions. To render clothing poetic, yes
but one must preserve its dignity as clothing.
Yves Saint-Laurent
#86. I am tired of this city. I am tired of its pagan pretensions and false histories. Hyperion is a poet's world devoid of poetry. Keats itself is a mixture of tawdry, false classicism and mindless, boomtown energy.
Dan Simmons
#87. I have no pretensions whatever to that kind of elegance which consists in tormenting a respectable man.
Jane Austen
#88. I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight.
Zadie Smith
#89. That all pretensions to being self-made hide the reciprocal truth, that we have unpayable debts to the world around us, to our community, to our forebears, to the ancients, to nature, to the gods.
Lewis Hyde
#90. The pretensions of final truth are always partlyan effort to obscure a darkly felt consciousness of the limits of human knowledge.
Reinhold Niebuhr
#91. Just make sure your intentions are not pretensions.
Emil Ludwig
#92. people to ourselves rather than Jesus, and then wonder why power has left the pulpit and why the deep theological treasures of some of the old hymns have degenerated into songs that exalt us above the glory of our Creator. Despite our pretensions, our pride grows
Matt Boswell
#93. We're being treated to the wisdom of some puffed up, little fart. Doing exactly what I used to do, pretensions to anarchy and art.
Don Henley
#94. These are the sort of things people ought to look at. Things without pretensions, satisfied to be merely themselves.
Aldous Huxley
#95. Nothing is more important than honesty in prayer. There are no pretensions in prayer, so the best place to begin is wherever you are.
Robert H. Schuller
#96. I expect nothing of man, and disown the race. The only folly is expecting what is never attained; man is most contemptible when compared with his own pretensions. It is better to laugh at man from outside the universe, than to weep for him within.
H.P. Lovecraft
#97. I don't know how to put on any tough guy pretensions.
Anson Mount
#98. No pretensions of goodness, of trying to do the right thing. We'd both wanted to embrace this fucked-up thing between us.
Leah Raeder
#99. Governments, whatever their pretensions otherwise, try to preserve themselves by holding the individual down ... Government itself, indeed, may be reasonably defined as a conspiracy against him. Its one permanent aim, whatever its form, is to hobble him sufficiently to maintain itself.
H.L. Mencken
#100. Pornographers are the enemies of women only because our contemporary ideology of pornography does not encompass the possibility of change, as if we were the slaves of history and not its makers ... Pornography is a satire on human pretensions.
Angela Carter
