Quotes About Pretexts

#1. Who is against democracy? Is it the one who calls for peaceful resistance, or the one who bombs people, sheds their blood and leads them away from the leaders under feeble and dirty pretexts?

Muqtada Al Sadr

#2. Mine was a trained Presbyterian conscience and knew but the one duty - to hunt and harry its slave upon all pretexts and on all occasions, particularly when there was no sense nor reason in it.

Mark Twain

#3. Then also pretexts for seizing property are never wanting, and one who begins to live by rapine will always find some reason for taking the goods of others, whereas causes for taking life are rarer and more quickly destroyed.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#4. Well, you can try to rationalize it all you want, you can invent all kinds of noble-sounding pretexts, but in the end, a scam is a scam.

Haruki Murakami

#5. History is nothing but a procession of false Absolutes, a series of temples raised to pretexts, a degradation of the mind before the Improbable.

Emile M. Cioran

#6. He who has once begun to live by robbery will always find pretexts for seizing what belongs to others;

Niccolo Machiavelli

#7. In its attempt to crush the Black Panthers, the FBI engineered frequent arrests on the flimsiest of pretexts.

Alexander Cockburn

#8. The love of truth, virtue, and the happiness of mankind are specious pretexts, but not the inward principles that set divines at work; else why should they affect to abuse human reason, to disparage natural religion, to traduce the philosophers as they universally do?

George Berkeley

#9. Managers at [the nuclear] sector should know that we need diplomacy and not slogans, .. This [is] where we should use all our leverages with patience and wisdom, without provocation and slogans that can give pretexts to the enemies.

Bill Vaughan

#10. For instinct dictates our duty and the intellect supplies us with pretexts for evading it.

Marcel Proust

#11. Youth does not require reasons for living, it only needs pretexts.

Jose Ortega Y Gasset

#12. Pretexts are not wanting when one wishes to use them.

Carlo Goldoni

#13. Fraternity means that the father no longer sacrifices the sons; instead the brothers kill one another. Wars between nations have been replaced by civil war. The great settling of accounts, first under national 'pretexts,' led to a rapidly escalating world civil war.

Ernst Junger

#14. Temporary deviations from fundamental principles are always more or less dangerous. When the first pretext fails, those who become interested in prolonging the evil will rarely be at a loss for other pretexts.

James Madison

#15. What we believe to be the motives of our conduct are usually but the pretexts for it.

Miguel De Unamuno

#16. Tyrants seldom want pretexts

Edmund Burke

#17. I saw in the whole Christian world a license of fighting at which even barbarous nations might blush. Wars were begun on trifling pretexts or none at all, and carried on without any reference of law, Divine or human.

Hugo Grotius

#18. But it is meaningless to speak of short-range and long-range plans. There are plans that lead to action today - and they are true plans, true strategic decisions. And there are plans that talk about action tomorrow - they are dreams, if not pretexts for nonthinking, nonplanning, nondoing. The

Peter F. Drucker

#19. Besides, the conflict is not really between royalty and democracy. It is between both and plutocracy, which, having destroyed the royal power by frank force under democratic pretexts, has bought and swallowed democracy.

Russell Kirk

#20. Faith's table is always laid, whether the invited guest sits down or stays away with a thousand excuses and pretexts.

Hans Urs Von Balthasar

#21. Often, the pretexts for starting a war are not real shortages of land, food or fuel, but rather perceptions - like fear, honor and perceived self-interest.

Victor Davis Hanson

#22. That was the trouble with formulating a system: what could you do but repeat it?

Peter Washington

#23. There aren't any hard women, only soft men.

Raquel Welch

#24. I never made a mistake in my life; at least, never one that I couldn't explain away afterwards.

Rudyard Kipling

#25. Opportunities are not offered. They must be wrested and worked for. And this calls for perseverance ... and courage.

Indira Gandhi

#26. The jewelry stores say, 'Tell your wife you love her with a diamond,' while wives tell you they love you with, 'Ok, but just because it's Valentine's Day.'

George Lopez

#27. A man has his clothes made to fit him; a woman makes herself fit her clothes.

E.W. Howe

#28. How terrible to be alcoholic. You just want to quietly soothe and maybe poison yourself, but you end up poisoning those around you as well, like trying to commit suicide with a gas oven and unwittingly murdering your neighbors.

Jonathan Ames

#29. Maybe I just never learned my harmony part, because what everybody says sounds odd to them sounds perfectly natural to me.

Elvis Costello

#30. You get a concussion. It could take 30, 40 days until that starts to come to life where you're in agony. Ask any doctor.

David Gest