Pretense Quotes - Page 8

• I think it started to feel like home when I stopped maintaining any pretense that I was ever going to be in the movie business. I went there like many writers - I had a screenplay deal and I would go to these meetings and it was the typical thing. And I hated it. I was not interested in writing screenplays, actually. But I kept feeling like that was what I was supposed to do. It was just this horrible cognitive dissonance.

  Meghan Daum

  Home, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• We cannot settle for the pretenses of connection, or for the parodies of self-love.

  Audre Lorde

  Self, Connections, Settling

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• The Republican Party has pretty much abandoned any pretense of being a traditional political party. It's in lockstep obedience to the very rich, the super rich and the corporate sector. They can't get votes that way so they have to mobilize a different constituency. It's always been there, but it's rarely been mobilized politically. They call it the religious right, but basically it's the extreme religious population.

  Noam Chomsky

  Religious, Party, Political

  "Noam Chomsky on America's Economic Suicide". Interview with Laura Flanders / GRITtv, www.alternet.org. May 4, 2012.

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• (Sarah Palin's) greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman.

  Wendy Doniger

  Hypocrisy, Palin

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• If I have caught myself struggling to remember, it was, if not a pretense, at least premature, in that I only ever used photography for my own pleasure - even if I then bewailed the vanished pleasure which my pictures brought back to me.

  Jeanloup Sieff

  Photography, Struggle, Remember

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• 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

  Opportunity, World, Conversation

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• 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

  Photography, Sweet, People

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• 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

  Pride, Self, Facts

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• The whip degrades; a severe father teaches his children to dissemble; their love is pretense, and their obedience a species of self-defense. Fear is the father of lies.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Children, Father, Lying

  Robert Green Ingersoll (1900). “Discussions”

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• Where's that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let's not make a false pretense of balance: it's coming, overwhelmingly, from the right. It's hard to imagine a Democratic member of Congress urging constituents to be "armed and dangerous" without being ostracized; but Representative Michele Bachmann, who did just that, is a rising star in the G.O.P.

  Paul Krugman

  Stars, Balance, Toxic

  "Climate of Hate". www.nytimes.com. January 9, 2011.

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• Even if Bush could be forgiven for taking America, and much of the rest of the world, to war on false pretenses, and for misrepresenting the cost of the venture, there is no excuse for how he chose to finance it. His was the first war in history paid for entirely on credit. As America went into battle, with deficits already soaring from his 2001 tax cut, Bush decided to plunge ahead with yet another round of tax "relief" for the wealthy.

  Joseph Stiglitz

  War, Cutting, America

  "The True Cost of 9/11" by Joseph Stiglitz, www.slate.com. September 1, 2011.

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• 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

  Should Have, Law, Credit

  Antonin Scalia (2016). “Scalia's Court: A Legacy of Landmark Opinions and Dissents”, p.241, Regnery Publishing

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• 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

  Dying, Accomplish, Unreal

  Duino Elegies no. 4 (written 1912) (translation by Stephen Mitchell)

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• Love of another is merely empty flattery and self-deception for one who cannot accept himself without pretense.

  L.E. Modesitt Jr.

  Self, Deception, Flattery

  L. E. Modesitt, Jr. (2010). “The Magic of Recluce”, p.378, Macmillan

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• 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

  Moving, Church, Needs

  Source: www.christianpost.com

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• It's useful to be born in a different culture because you see things that are not obvious. I come from France. In France, there isn't a pretense of objectivity in publishing. I discovered - and I don't agree with it - that in the US, the New York Times or The New Yorker has to pretend to be objective, and if they present this point of view then they have to also present the other side.

  Francoise Mouly

  Different, Culture, Obvious

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• It's not just the embarrassment of tears. That's part of it, no doubt, but what embarrasses me much more, and always will, is the paralysis that took my heart. A moral freeze: I couldn't decide, I couldn't act, I couldn't comport myself with even a pretense of modest human dignity.

  Tim O'Brien

  Heart, Doubt, Tears

  Tim O'Brien (2009). “The Things They Carried”, p.54, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• They were stars on this stage, each playing to an audience of two: the passion of their pretense created the actuality. Here, finally, was the quintessence of self-expression-- yet it was probable that for the most part their love expressed Gloria rather than Anthony. He felt often like a scarecly tolerated guest at a party she was giving.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Stars, Party, Passion

  F. Scott Fitzgerald (2015). “The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Articles, Letters, Plays & Screenplays: From the author of The Great Gatsby, The Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and many other notable works”, p.636, e-artnow

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• It is said slavery is all we are fighting for, and if we give it up we give up all. Even if this were true, which we deny, slavery is not all our enemies are fighting for. It is merely the pretense to establish sectional superiority and a more centralized form of government, and to deprive us of our rights and liberties.

  Patrick Cleburne

  Giving Up, War, Military

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• LEXICOGRAPHER, n. A pestilent fellow who, under the pretense of recording some particular stage in the development of a language, does what he can to arrest its growth, stiffen its flexibility and mechanize its methods.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Growth, Lexicographer, Doe

  Ambrose Bierce (2013). “The Devil's Dictionary: Complete & Unabridged”, p.147, Courier Corporation

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• ...the pretense is made, as it has been made in relation to the finding of any extension of truth, that to do away with right and wrong would produce uncivilized people, immorality, lawlessness and social chaos. The fact is that most psychiatrists and psychologists and other respected people have escaped from moral chains and are able to think freely.

  Brock Chisholm

  Family, Thinking, People

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• What matters is abuse, and how it is anchored in a religion that denies women their rights as humans. What matters is that atrocities against women and children are carried out in Europe. What matters is that governments and societies must stop hiding behind a hollow pretense of tolerance so that they can recognize and deal with the problem.

  Ayaan Hirsi Ali

  Children, Europe, What Matters

  Ayaan Hirsi Ali (2008). “Infidel”, p.326, Simon and Schuster

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• Try to find the real tense of the report you are reading: Was it done, is it being done, or is something to be done? Reports are now written in four tenses: past tense, present tense, future tense, and pretense. Watch for novel uses of CONGRAM (CONtractor GRAMmer), defined by the past imperfect, the present insufficient, and the future absolutely perfect.

  Amrom Harry Katz

  Real, Future, Reading

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• 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

  Winning, College, Swings

  "Nate Silver Took A Huge Shot Against Mainstream Political Pundits In His Latest Election Forecast" by Joe Weisenthal, www.businessinsider.com. November 3, 2012.

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• Prison is a crash course in the darker side of life. Few survive it without becoming a different person: more cynical, jaded, fearful, angry. Its hard to trust again, hard to believe, easy to hate a system that destroyed your life behind the pompous pretense of saving you from yourself, for your own good.

  Peter McWilliams

  Hate, Believe, Cynical

  Peter McWilliams (1996). “Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in Our Free Country”, Mary Book / Prelude Press

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