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Tag Name "Pretensions" (60)

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Pretensions to moral superiority are devastatingly destructive.
Mary Douglas
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Every man, however hopeless his pretensions may appear, has some project by which he hopes to rise to reputation some art by which he imagines that the attention of the world will be attracted some quality, good or bad, which discriminates him from the common herd of mortals, and by which others may be persuaded to love, or compelled to fear him.
Samuel Johnson
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Having nothing to do, I am correcting the Paris edition of Bach not only the engraver's mistakes, but also the mistakes hallowed by those who are supposed to understand Bach (I have no pretensions to understand better, but I do think that sometimes I can guess).
Frederic Chopin
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We have always pretensions to fame which, in our own hearts, we know to be disputable.
Samuel Johnson
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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
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If you try to go beyond your interests just for the sake of pretensions or wealth, your art becomes less legitimate.
Vincent D'Onofrio
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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
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To a superior race of being the pretensions of mankind to extraordinary sanctity and virtue must seem... ridiculous.
William Hazlitt
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THE COMPUTER IS JUST AN INSTRUMENT for doing faster what we already know how to do slower. All pretensions to computer intelligence and paradise-tomorrow promises should be toned down before the public turns away in disgust. And if that should happen, our civilization might not survive.
Gian-Carlo Rota
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To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified.
William James
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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
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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
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Governments, whatever their pretensions otherwise, try to preserve themselves by holding the individual down ... Government itself, indeed, may be reasonably defined as a conspiracy against him. Its one permanent aim, whatever its form, is to hobble him sufficiently to maintain itself.
H. L. Mencken
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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
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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. It can follow analysis but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths. Its province is to assist us to making available what we are already acquainted with.
Ada Lovelace
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... 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
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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
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You showed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased.
Jane Austen
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They're innocent movies, and they're fun movies and there were no pretensions about 'em.
Alex Winter
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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
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Pornographers are the enemies of women only because our contemporary ideology of pornography does not encompass the possibility of change, as if we were the slaves of history and not its makers. . . . Pornography is a satire on human pretensions.
Angela Carter
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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
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I don't know how to put on any tough guy pretensions.
Anson Mount
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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
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