Pretensions quotes:

Send

Success plus Self-esteem equals Pretensions. -- William James
Pretensions to moral superiority are devastatingly destructive. -- Mary Douglas
I don't know how to put on any tough guy pretensions. -- Anson Mount
--
They're innocent movies, and they're fun movies and there were no pretensions about 'em. -- Alex Winter
I wish Obama would focus on governing the United States and would forget his country's imperialist pretensions. -- Hugo Chavez
To a superior race of being the pretensions of mankind to extraordinary sanctity and virtue must seem... ridiculous. -- William Hazlitt
Stripped of ethical rationalizations and philosophical pretensions, a crime is anything that a group in power chooses to prohibit. -- Freda Adler
I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight. -- Zadie Smith
--
The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labour in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour. -- Frederic Raphael
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. -- John Roberts
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
How much energy is wasted in Italy in trying to write the novel that obeys all the rules. The energy might have been useful to provide us with more modest, more genuine things, that had less pretensions: short stories, memoirs, notes, testimonials, or at any rate, books that are open, without a preconceived plan. -- Italo Calvino
Pornography is a satire on human pretensions. -- Angela Carter
Just make sure your intentions are not pretensions. -- Emil Ludwig
--
What is a harp but an oversized cheese slicer with cultural pretensions? -- Denis Norden
To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified. -- William James
What divides men is less a difference in ideas than a likeness in pretensions. -- Pierre-Jean de Beranger
... the worst possible heritage to leave with children: high spiritual pretensions and low performance. -- D. A. Carson
Despite its scientific pretensions, economics still remains more of an art than a science -- Robert Kuttner
For the most part, biophiliacs,lovers of life, are found among simple people, without pretensions. -- Erich Fromm
When intimacy followed love in Italy there were no longer any vain pretensions between two lovers. -- Stendhal
We have always pretensions to fame which, in our own hearts, we know to be disputable. -- Samuel Johnson
I have no pretensions whatever to that kind of elegance which consists in tormenting a respectable man. -- Jane Austen
Your worst and most dangerous enemy is the person that injures you under the pretensions of friendship. -- Norm MacDonald
Fighting battles is like courting girls: those who make the most pretensions and are boldest usually win. -- Rutherford B. Hayes
You showed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased. -- Jane Austen
Vanity Fair is a very vain, wicked, foolish place, full of all sorts of humbugs and falsenesses and pretensions. -- William Makepeace Thackeray
These are the sort of things people ought to look at. Things without pretensions, satisfied to be merely themselves. -- Aldous Huxley
The pretensions of final truth are always partlyan effort to obscure a darkly felt consciousness of the limits of human knowledge. -- Reinhold Niebuhr
Love is an artful arrangement of artless pretensions, whereby we labor to appear innocent in what we desire to be most cunning. -- Norm MacDonald
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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. -- John Roberts
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
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
... 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
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
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
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
I don't see anything other than pretensions and low mentality in women who make a man run after a hole that would soon be inhabited by termites and worms. -- Michael Bassey Johnson
Man â?? despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication, and his many accomplishments â?? owes his existence to a six inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains. -- Paul Harvey
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
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
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
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
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

Send