Pretension Quotes - Page 6

• 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

  Majority, Groups, Minorities

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• Pornography is a satire on human pretensions.

  Angela Carter

  Satire, Pornography, Humans

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• When you're somebody who has the pretension to make art, it's completely different from when someone else says I want to make a book of your art. You don't decide the title, you don't decide the size, the order of the photographs . . . so it's completely out of control!

  Luis Gonzalez

  Art, Book, Order

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• 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

  Photography, Lying, Believe

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• General Otis is proclaimed American Military Governor of the Philippines and I protest a thousand times and with all the force in my soul against such pretension.

  Emilio Aguinaldo

  Military, Soul, Philippines

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• 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

  Capitalist Economy, Practice, Understanding

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• I just know that he's Robbie Williams - he's massive, that's all I know! He nailed it. Working in the studio with him was cool. I got there at about six in the afternoon and then stayed until six in the morning. We only worked for like two hours, the rest of the time we were just chilling out the back. The way Robbie handles everything... he's a star, but there were never any pretensions, no ego. He put effort in.

  Dizzee Rascal

  Morning, Stars, Two

  Source: thequietus.com

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• A good analogy [Charlie Hebdo] in lots of ways is "South Park" - the hugely popular American cartoon show - and the things that the "South Park" creators have created, like "The Book Of Mormon," the Broadway musical. If I were a devout Mormon, I would be offended by a lot of things that go on in "The Book Of Mormon," right? It mocks mercilessly the pretensions to truth of Mormonism and the pretensions to virtue of Mormon missionaries.

  Adam Gopnik

  Book, Charlie Hebdo, Musical

  Source: www.npr.org

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• The literary world is so full of pretension, and there's such an enormous gap between how seriously poets take themselves and how widely they're ignored by everybody else.

  Billy Collins

  World, Gaps, Ignored

  "A Brisk Walk". Interview with Joel Whitney, www.guernicamag.com. June 14, 2006.

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• My influences are jazz, blues, European classical music; they are rock music and pop music. So many kinds of music. World music from different countries like India and China. I think that would be a shame not to take advantage and do something... not unique, because I don't have this pretension.

  Rokia Traore

  Country, Unique, Thinking

  Interview with Stephen M. Deusner, pitchfork.com. March 6, 2009.

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• When High and Mighty people want to make us believe that they possess some good quality which they in fact do not have, it is dangerous to show that you doubt them; because, by removing their hope of deceiving the world, you also remove their desire to perform the good acts that might have arisen from their very pretensions.

  Madeleine de Souvre, marquise de Sable

  Lying, Believe, People

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• The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.

  Ada Lovelace

  Order, Know How, Knows

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• What I bring - my team and I, because it's not only me - is this sense of elegance and casualness, and no pretension. There's also a sense of loyalty - loyalty to my customers, but also loyalty from my staff. Also, I think a sense of perfection; I'm a bit of an obsessed freak with perfection. I think I bring craziness sometimes, because if there is someone who's going to dare do something crazy, it's me.

  Daniel Boulud

  Loyalty, Crazy, Team

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Take the shortest route. The one that nature planned - to speak and act in the healthiest way. Do that, and be free of pain and stress, free of all calculations and pretension.

  Marcus Aurelius

  Pain, Stress, Way

  Marcus Aurelius, Plato, Aristotle (2012). “The Modern Library Collection of Greek and Roman Philosophy 3-Book Bundle: Meditations; Selected Dialogues of Plato; The Basic Works of Aristotle”, p.148, Modern Library

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• 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

  Fun, Wish, Atoms

  Greg Bear (2014). “Sleepside: The Collected Fantasies”, p.26, Open Road Media

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• Pretences go a great way with men that take fair words and magisterial looks for current payment.

  Roger L'Estrange

  Men, Looks, Way

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• Men indulge those opinions and practices that favor their pretensions.

  Roger L'Estrange

  Men, Practice, Favors

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• News-hunters have great leisure, with little thought; much petty ambition to be considered intelligent, without any other pretension than being able to communicate what they have just learned.

  Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann

  Ambition, Intelligent, Gossip

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• It is not the feeling sure of a doctrine (be it what it may) which I call an assumption of infallibility. It is the undertaking to decide that question for others, without allowing them to hear what can be said on the contrary side. And I denounce and reprobate this pretension not the less, if put forth on the side of my most solemn convictions.

  John Stuart Mill

  Feelings, Doctrine, May

  Source: www.usconstitution.net

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• I do have a very conscious desire not to be academic. I'm antiacademic. I hate jargon. I hate that sort of pretension. I am a person who [commits] breaches of decorum - not in private life, but in my work. They are part of my mode of operation. That kind of playfulness is part of my nature in general. The paradox that, in a way, to take something very seriously, you can't always be serious about it.

  William H. Gass

  Hate, Desire, Jargon

  Interview with Stephen Schenkenberg, www.believermag.com. November, 2005.

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• 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

  Government, Support, Honor

  John Adams, George A. Peek, Jr. (2003). “The Political Writings of John Adams: Representative Selections”, p.85, Hackett Publishing

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• [T]he 47th proposition in Euclid might now be voted down with as much ease as any proposition in politics; and therefore if Lord Hawkesbury hates the abstract truths of science as much as he hates concrete truth in human affairs, now is his time for getting rid of the multiplication table, and passing a vote of censure upon the pretensions of the hypotenuse.

  Sydney Smith

  Hate, Science, Ease

  SYDNEY SMITH (1839). “The Works”, p.374

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• Excusations, cessions, modesty itself well governed, are but arts of ostentation.

  Francis Bacon

  Art, Modesty, Wells

  Francis Bacon (1856). “Bacon's Essays”, p.478

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• I got a rejection letter from an editor at HarperCollins, who included a report from his professional reader. This report shredded my first-born novel, laughed at my phrasing, twirled my lacy pretensions around and gobbed into the seething mosh pit of my stolen clichés. As I read the report, the world became very quiet and stopped rotating. What poisoned me was the fact that the report's criticisms were all absolutely true. The sound of my landlady digging in the garden got the world moving again. I slipped the letter into the trash... knowing I'd remember every word.

  David Mitchell

  Moving, Writing, Garden

  "Once upon a life" by David Mitchell, www.theguardian.com. May 8, 2010.

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• The Rolling Stones have been the best of all possible worlds: they have the lack of pretension and sentimentality associated with the blues, the rawness and toughness of hard rock, and the depth which always makes you feel that they are in the midst of saying something. They have never impressed me as being kitsch.

  Jon Landau

  Rocks, Depth, Rolling

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