Specious Quotes

#1. It seemed to her that while people were very happy, individual persons were surely damned. So, she shrank from that specious mystery the individual throws about himself, from Anna's smiles, from Lilian's tomorrows, from the shut-in room, the turned-in heart.

Elizabeth Bowen

#2. Our specious present as such is very short. We do, however, experience passing events; part of the process of the passage of events is directly there in our experience, including some of the past and some of the future.

George Herbert Mead

#3. Extraordinary that those who command the perquisites of place are those most ready to ignore them! It is as if the blessings of Providence are specious, and notable only in their absence. Ah well, I refuse to speculate.

Jack Vance

#4. One to destroy, is murder by the law; and gibbets keep the lifted hand in awe; to murder thousands, takes a specious name, 'War's glorious art', and gives immortal fame.

Edward Young

#5. 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

#6. To shave off the beard (or any body hair) is to symbolically annihilate the (essentially specious) boundary separating Self from Other

Neal Stephenson

#7. Whatever study tends neither directly nor indirectly to make us better men and citizens is at best but a specious and ingenious sort of idleness; and the knowledge we acquire by it only a creditable kind of ignorance, nothing more.

Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke

#8. Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them.

Vaclav Havel

#9. Hate is strewn like confetti by the fear-fueled, specious, tiny- dicked (or un-tender) vacuous dictators, of any gender, whom never knew true love, only sadism. They ALL need some good pharma.

Elizabeth Lucye Robillard

#10. The supreme mystery of despotism, its prop and stay, is to keep men in a state of deception, and with the specious title of religion to cloak the fear by which they must be held in check, so that they will fight for their servitude as if for salvation.

Baruch Spinoza

#11. 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

#12. The greater number of a man's errors come before him disguised under the specious form of necessity; then, after error has been committed in a moment of excitement, of delirium, or of fear, we see that we might have avoided and escaped it.

Alexandre Dumas

#13. If I am not mistaken, psychology, psychiatry and some branches of sociology, not to speak about the so-called philosophy of history, are even more affected by what I have called the scientistic prejudice, and by specious claims of what science can achieve.

Friedrich August Von Hayek

#14. In the practice of art ... it is necessary to keep a watchful and jealous eye over ourselves; idleness, assuming the specious disguise of industry ... may be employed to evade and shuffle off real labor - the real labor of thinking.

Joshua Reynolds

#15. Being a Georgia author is a rather specious dignity, on the same order as, for the pig, being a Talmadge ham.

Flannery O'Connor

#16. Besides, humility had always seemed to him a specious thing, invented for the comfort of others; you were praised for humility by people because you did not make them feel any more lacking than they already did. It was honesty that he valued;

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#17. The distinction between children and adults, while probably useful for some purposes, is at bottom a specious one, I feel. There are only individual egos, crazy for love.

Donald Barthelme

#18. Conscience, as a mentor, the guide and compass of every act, leads ever to happiness. When the individual can stay alone with his or her conscience and get its approval, without knowing force or specious knowledge, then he or she begins to know what real happiness is.

William George Jordan

#19. And where do you see in all this the influence of the Castle?" asked K. "So far it doesn't seem to have come in. What you've told me about is simply the ordinary senseless fear of the people, malicious pleasure in hurting a neighbor, specious friendship, things that can be found anywhere, ...

Franz Kafka

#20. We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living.

R. Buckminster Fuller

#21. Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral: a thing as single and specious as a statue to the first glance, and yet, on examination, as lively and interesting as a forest in detail.

Robert Louis Stevenson

#22. Film has become such a central part of our culture now that I think sometimes too great a weight is placed upon it in terms of scrutiny and analysis. There's a lot of rather specious professorial stuff that swirls around films.

Daniel Day-Lewis

#23. If I had seen one miracle fail, I had witnessed another; and even a seemingly purposeless miracle is an inexhaustible source of hope, because it proves to us that since we do not understand everything, our defeats - so much more numerous than our few and empty victories - may be equally specious.

Gene Wolfe

#24. A thing may look specious in theory, and yet be ruinous in practice; a thing may look evil in theory, and yet be in practice excellent.

Edmund Burke

#25. The Northern onslaught upon slavery was no more than a piece of specious humbug designed to conceal its desire for economic control of the Southern states.

Charles Dickens

#26. You may create a inspirational & visually resplendent strategy map but without accountability its value is specious

Paul R. Niven

#27. During the fifth inning, something came to the edge of the woods and looked at her. Flies and noseeums made a cloud around its rudiment of a face. In the specious brilliance of its eyes was a complete history of nothing. It stood there for a long time.

Stephen King

#28. Against specious appearances we must set clear convictions, bright and ready for use. When death appears as an evil, we ought immediately to remember that evils are things to be avoided, but death is inevitable.

Epictetus

#29. A person's right to a job is as specious as his boss' right to success in business. There is no right to a minimum wage, just as there is no right to success in self-employment.

Rex Curry

#30. My statement to Harris that his book contains much to admire is specious hyperbole. In The End of Faith, Harris rails against religious fundamentalism, which seems obvious, as well as against religious moderates, which seems intolerant.

Nick Flynn

#31. The ruin of the human heart is self-interest, which the American merchant calls self-service. We have become a self-service populace, and all our specious comforts -the automatic elevator, the escalator, the cafeteria -are depriving us of volition and moral and physical energy.

Edward Dahlberg

#32. The vigour of government is essential to the security of liberty ... a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people, than under the forbidding appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government.

Alexander Hamilton

#33. Under the specious pretext of effecting 'the happiness of the whole community,' nearly all the wrongs and intrusions of government has been carried through.

Walt Whitman

#34. Because there is nothing that lasts, the foundation of historical life - trust in all its forms - is destroyed. Because truth is not trusted, specious propaganda takes over.[127] Because justice is not trusted, whatever is useful is declared to be just.[128]

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#35. When Eve upon the first of Men
The apple press'd with specious cant,
Oh! what a thousand pities then
That Adam was not adamant!

Thomas Hood

#36. Like the ostrich, head under wingWhen the roaring storm breaks,So many people take refugeUnder the soft pillowOf specious arguments.

Georges Rouault

#37. Wolfe grunted. "That's admirably specious, but drop it. I give you my word that I haven't the faintest notion of who killed Ellen Tenzer." Cramer eyed him. "Your word?" "Yes, sir.

Rex Stout

#38. English, as a subject, never really got over its upstart nature. It tries to bulk itself up with hopeless jargon and specious complexity, tries to imitate subjects it can never be.

Zadie Smith

#39. For neither do the spirits damned
Lose all their virtue, lest bad men should boast
Their specious deeds on earth which glory excites,
Or close ambition varnished o'er with zeal.

John Milton

#40. When for so long you can't get a job for reasons that seem specious, you you finally do have it, you are constantly afraid of losing it.

Jessica Savitch

#41. The custom of prefixing or appending to historical narratives an estimate of the character and personality of the principal agent is of doubtful advantage at the best of times - it either imparts a specious unity to the action or permits apology or condemnation on moral and emotional grounds.

Ronald Syme

#42. Goodreads could be a source for knowledge but instead does all readers a supreme disservice by allowing the spread of false quotes on the Internet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson