Pretensions Quotes

#1. The panes streamed with rain, and the short street he looked down into lay wet and empty, as if swept clear suddenly by a great flood. It was a very trying day, choked in raw fog to begin with, and now drowned in cold rain. The flickering, blurred flames of gas-lamps seemed to be dissolving in a watery atmosphere. And the lofty pretensions of a mankind oppressed by the miserable indignities of the weather appeared as a colossal and hopeless vanity deserving of scorn, wonder, and compassion. #Quote by Joseph Conrad

#2. 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. #Quote by Friedrich Schleiermacher

#3. Under the guidance of the Reich, Europe would speedily have become unified. Once the Jewish poison had been eradicated, unification would have been an easy matter. France and Italy, each defeated in turn at an interval of a few months by the two Germanic Powers, would have been well out of it. Both would have had to renounce their inappropriate aspirations to greatness. At the same time they would have had to renounce their pretensions in North Africa and the Near East; and that would have allowed Europe to pursue a bold policy of friendship towards Islam. (4th February 1945) #Quote by Adolf Hitler

#4. No pretensions of goodness, of trying to do the right thing. We'd both wanted to embrace this fucked-up thing between us. #Quote by Leah Raeder

#5. 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. #Quote by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

#6. Unlike most women I have known, she placed no value on shallow pretensions or hypocritical displays of gentility. #Quote by Pat Conroy

#7. It is part of the nature of a strong erotic passion - as distinct from a transient fit of appetite - that makes more towering promises than any other emotion. No doubt all our desires makes promises, but not so impressively. To be in love involves the almost irresistible conviction that one will go on being in love until one dies, and that possession of the beloved will confer, not merely frequent ecstasies, but settled, fruitful, deep-rooted, lifelong happiness. Hence all seems to be at stake. If we miss this chance we shall have lived in vain. At the very thought of such a doom we sink into fathomless depths of self-pity.

Unfortunately these promises are found often to be quite untrue. Every experienced adult knows this to be so as regards all erotic passions (except the one he himself is feeling at the moment). We discount the world-without-end pretensions of our friends' amours easily enough. We know that such things sometimes last - and sometimes don't. And when they do last, this is not because they promised at the outset to do so. When two people achieve lasting happiness, this is not solely because they are great lovers but because they are also - I must put it crudely - good people; controlled, loyal, fair-minded, mutually adaptable people.

If we establish a "right to (sexual) happiness" which supersedes all the ordinary rules of behavior, we do so not because of what our passion shows itself to be in experience but because of what it professes #Quote by C.S. Lewis

#8. Their pretensions are naked and vulnerable and for that reason, to me at least, rather charming. #Quote by Julian Fellowes

#9. 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. #Quote by John Astin

#10. Many peoples practiced agriculture, but they were never obsessed by the delusion that what they were doing was *right*, that everyone in the entire world had to practice agriculture, that every last square yard of the planet had to be devoted to it...

If they got tired of being agriculturalists, if they found they didn't like where it was leading them in their particular adaptation, they were *able* to give it up. They didn't say to themselves, 'Well, we've got to keep going at this even if it kills us, because its the *right* way to live.' For example, there was once a people who constructed a vast network of irrigation canals in order to farm the deserts of what is now southeastern Arizona. They maintained these canals for three thousand years and built a fairly advanced civilization, but in the end they were free to say, 'This is a toilsome and unsatisfying way to live, so to hell with it.' They simply walked away from the whole thing and put it so totally out of mind that we don't even know what they called themselves. The only name we have for them is the one the Pima Indians gave them: Hohokam--those who vanished.

But it's not going to be this easy for the Takers. It's going to be hard as hell for them to give it up, because what they're doing is *right*... Giving it up would mean that all along they'd been *wrong*. It would mean they'd *never* known how to rule the world. It would mean relinquishing their pretensions to godhood.... It would mean #Quote by Daniel Quinn

#11. To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified. #Quote by William James

#12. What divides men is less a difference in ideas than a likeness in pretensions. #Quote by Pierre-Jean De Beranger

#13. Kings ought never to be seen upon the stage. In the abstract, they are very disagreeable characters: it is only while living that they are 'the best of kings'. It is their power, their splendour, it is the apprehension of the personal consequences of their favour or their hatred that dazzles the imagination and suspends the judgement of their favourites or their vassals; but death cancels the bond of allegiance and of interest; and seen AS THEY WERE, their power and their pretensions look monstrous and ridiculous. #Quote by William Hazlitt

#14. Contemporary philosophers have exercised themselves with the problem of our knowledge of other minds. Enmeshed in the dogma of the ghost in the machine, they have found it impossible to discover any logically satisfactory evidence warranting one person in believing that there exist minds other than his own. I can witness what your body does, but I cannot witness what your mind does, and my pretensions to infer from what your body does to what your mind does all collapse, since the premises for such inferences are either inadequate or unknowable. #Quote by Gilbert Ryle

#15. I'd been to a lot of shows and I was just tired of people being jaded about music in general. Just a lot of pretensions, a lot of the attitude that goes along with it was a little difficult for me to deal with. #Quote by Girl Talk

#16. 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. #Quote by Samuel Johnson

#17. In the middle of the next century, when the literary establishment will reflect the multicultural makeup of this country and not be dominated by assimiliationists with similar tastes, from similar backgrounds, and of similar pretensions, Langston Hughes will be to the twentieth century what Walt Whitman was to the nineteenth. #Quote by Ishmael Reed

#18. When Leopold wrote that the precise frontiers of the new state or states would be defined later, [German Chancellor] Bismarck said to an aide, His Majesty displays the pretensions and naive selfishness of an Italian who considers that his charm and good looks will enable him to get away with anything. #Quote by Adam Hochschild

#19. I don't know how to put on any tough guy pretensions. #Quote by Anson Mount

#20. In the age of democratic nationalism, imperialism needed deeper self-justifications:
The idea that despotism of any kind was an offence against humanity, had crystallised into an instinctive feeling, and modern morality and sentiment revolted against the enslavement of nation by nation, of class by class or of man by man. Imperialism had to justify itself to this modern sentiment and could only do so by pretending to be a trustee of liberty, commissioned from on high to civilize the uncivilized and train the untrained until the time had come when the benevolent conqueror had done his work and could unselfishly retire. Such were the professions with which England justified her usurpation of the heritage of the Moghul and dazzled us into acquiescence in servitude by the splendour of her uprightness and generosity. Such was the pretence with which she veiled her annexation of Egypt. These Pharisiac pretensions were especially necessary to British Imperialism because in England the Puritanic middle class had risen to power and imparted to the English temperament a sanctimonious self-righteousness which refused to indulge in injustice and selfish spoliation except under a cloak of virtue, benevolence and unselfish altruism. #Quote by Pankaj Mishra

#21. There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment and expose the pretensions of tyrants and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant. And that is the force of human freedom. #Quote by George W. Bush

#22. We sweat for our pretensions. It #Quote by David Sedaris

#23. This absolute triumph over the arrogant pretensions of the austrians was also, unusually in the circumstances, a triumph for common sense, because, however much blood might have been spilled in castelo rodrigo, any war between portugal and austria would be, not only absurd, but impracticable, unless the two countries were to rent an area of land in France, for example, more or less halfway between the two contenders, so that they could martial their respective armies and organise a battle. #Quote by Jose Saramago

#24. 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. #Quote by Bob Ainsworth

#25. 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. #Quote by Tom Stoppard

#26. The inability of Darwinian psychology to account for human reasoning is devastating to its pretensions to be a science. The prestige of science depends on the application of highly advanced practical and theoretical reason. A 'science' that is incompatible with such reasoning is therefore at odds with the very essence of scientific activity. #Quote by Angus J.L. Menuge

#27. 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. #Quote by Anthony Trollope

#28. 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. #Quote by Adam Gopnik

#29. In old magazines and newspapers we find a number of uncomfortably revealing things: the aged as young, the dead as living, forgotten people as celebrities, an array of our own barbarous and long-discarded fads and postures, and worst, visible only in this removed perspective, our own sickening pretensions to meaning and permanence. #Quote by Robert Grudin

#30. The way towards this aim is clear. A science that insists on possessing the only correct method and the only acceptable results is ideology and must be separated from the state, and especially from the process of education. One may teach it, but only to those who have decided to make this particular superstition their own. On the other hand, a science that has dropped such totalitarian pretensions is no longer independent and self-contained, and it can be taught in many different combinations (myth and modern cosmology might be one such combination). Of course, every business has the right to demand that its practitioners be prepared in a special way, and it may even demand acceptance of a certain ideology (I for one am against the thinning out of subjects so that they become more and more similar to each other; whoever does not like present-day Catholicism should leave it and become a Protestant, or an Atheist, instead of ruining it by such inane changes as mass in the vernacular). That is true of physics, just as it is true of religion, or of prostitution. #Quote by Paul Karl Feyerabend

#31. 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. #Quote by Rob Brezsny

#32. The view that humans are passive receptacles of stereotypes, words, and images is condescending to ordinary people and gives unearned importance to the pretensions of cultural and academic elites. #Quote by Steven Pinker

#33. 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. #Quote by Richard A. Falk

#34. As a gentleman- assuming you still have some pretensions in that direction- of honor- again, perhaps presumptuous, but still supposing your passing acquaintance with the concept- it is your duty- I won't even trouble to speculate here, but remain naively hopeful- to protect those under your care. #Quote by Connie Brockway

#35. When we are aware of our inner-growth potential yet have no pretensions about ourselves, when we are vulnerable, then we can change. #Quote by Amit Goswami

#36. I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. #Quote by Daniel J. Boorstin

#37. Whenever two unbelievers quarrel, the may both say some very insightful things about the unsightly habits of the other.
The postmodernists are very good at pointing out the pretensions of the modernists. And the modernists are very good at pointing out the incoherence of the postmodernists. #Quote by Douglas Wilson

#38. If you are not drawing fire from both Pharisees and Sadducees, you are probably saying something other than what Jesus said. And if your message is not drawing both tax collectors (Roman collaborators) and zealots (anti-Roman insurrectionists) to repentance, you are probably speaking with a different voice than does he. Jesus wasn't inconsistent. He saw the Roman Empire, despite all its pretensions to preeminence both in its own mind and in the mind of its opponents, as a temporary obstacle, not the defining point of his agenda. We stand and we speak, with reconciliation in view. We see, therefore, even our most passionate critic not as an argument to be vaporized but as a neighbor to be evangelized. This doesn't mean that we back down one iota from the truth. But we proclaim the whole gospel of truth and grace, never backing down from either. That means taking seriously the arguments of our opponents, not merely caricatures of those arguments. #Quote by Russell D. Moore

#39. Unnatural, unorthodox, amoral: those pretensions crumble when confronted by true happiness. You shouldn't give another the authority to draw a line defining the boundaries of acceptable joy. #Quote by Darrell Drake

#40. A man who writes a book, thinks himself wiser or wittier than the rest of mankind; he supposes that he can instruct or amuse them, and the publick to whom he appeals, must, after all, be the judges of his pretensions. #Quote by Samuel Johnson

#41. Fighting battles is like courting girls: those who make the most pretensions and are boldest usually win. #Quote by Rutherford B. Hayes

#42. Gideon conquers, the church conquers, we conquer, because faith conquers. But the victory belongs not to Gideon, the church, or ourselves, but to God. And God's victory means our defeat, our humiliation; it means God's derision and wrath at all human pretensions of might, at humans puffing themselves up and thinking they are somebodies themselves. It means the world and its shouting is silenced, that all our ideas and plans are frustrated; it means the cross. The cross over the world
that means that human beings, even the most noble, go down to dust whether it suits them or not, and with them all the gods and idols and lords of this world. The cross of Jesus Christ
that means God's bitter mockery of all human grandeur and God's bitter suffering in all human misery, God's lordship over all the world. #Quote by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#43. The very essence of gravity was design, and, consequently, deceit; it was a taught trick to gain credit of the world for more sense end knowledge than a man was worth; and that with all its pretensions it was no better, but often worse, than what a French wit had long ago defined it
a mysterious carriage of the body to cover the defects of the mind. #Quote by Laurence Sterne

#44. I will, from today, cease trying to impress others as being someone other than who I am or what I am. I will, from today try to express myself as I really am; no pretensions, no misrepresentations and no real concerns for what I think others expect of me. I'm just going to be me! I am going to forgive myself for all my human foibles and frailties, to date, and accept my many past indiscretions as natural and normal in a personal growth process. Oh what a relief - I'll just be the best me I can be and do the best I can. If I do the best I can - what more can any one want of me. #Quote by Melvin Hassan

#45. That was the end of my adventure in Central America. By the lakeshore in Granada, Nicaragua, I decided to turn for home. I wondered what Cortes would have said if, when he set out in the wake of Columbus, he had foreseen the beach outside Granada. He knew in his bones of the glory to come, would he have known about its eclipse? A Church without the True Cross, unable to protect its buildings from earthquake or idolatry; the gold and silver mines exhausted; the children of the Conquest reduced to beggary, placing their trust in the redundant theories of a Victorian economist; the empire overwhelmed by its own pagan and monstrous child. What a fool time has made of Cortes and his pretensions. He should have turned back to Cuba, to his dice and his saints and his women, and left the Indians with the Gods they honour, against all the odds, to this day. #Quote by Patrick Marnham

#46. 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. #Quote by David O. McKay

#47. 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. #Quote by Elias Hicks

#48. I am, indeed, against all proselyters, whether they be on my side or on some other side. What moves nine-tenths of them, I believe, is simply the certainty of the result that I have just mentioned. Their lofty pretensions are all tosh. The thing they yearn for is the satisfaction of making someone unhappy: that yearning is almost as universal among them as thirst is in dry Congressmen. #Quote by H.L. Mencken

#49. And people turn to internet with the hope that in this virtual world, where real identity need not be disclosed, they will find someone before whom they could be their true self,without any pretensions and get an opportunity to release the pent-up emotions and feel light. #Quote by Chitralekha Paul

#50. The Lives of the Poets are, on the whole, the best of Johnson's works. The narratives are as entertaining as any novel. The remarks on life and on human nature are eminently shrewd and profound. The criticisms are often excellent, and, even when grossly and provokingly unjust, well deserve to be studied. For, however erroneous they may be, they are never silly. They are the judgments of a mind trammelled by prejudice and deficient in sensibility, but vigorous and acute. They therefore generally contain a portion of valuable truth which deserves to be separated from the alloy; and, at the very worst, they mean something, a praise to which much of what is called criticism in our time has no pretensions. #Quote by Samuel Johnson

#51. We were born in the mist of time on this land together with the oaks and fir trees. We are bound to it not only by the bread and existence it furnishes us as we toil on it, but also by all the bones of our ancestors who sleep in its ground. All our parents are here. All our memories, all our war-like glory, all our history here, in this land lies buried. . . . By what right do the Jews wish to take this land from us? On what historical argument do they base their pretensions and particularly the audacity with which they defy us Romanians, here in our own land? We are bound to this land by millions of tombs and millions of unseen threads that only our soul feels, and woe to those who shall try to snatch us from it. #Quote by Corneliu Codreanu

#52. Good God, is the man a heathen?'

'Worse, a capitalist with pretensions of culture. #Quote by Melanie Jackson

#53. It is an insult to God to believe in God. For on the one hand it is to suppose that he has perpetrated acts of incalculable cruelty. On the other, it is to suppose that he has perversely given his human creatures an instrument - their intellect - which must inevitably lead them, if they are dispassionate and honest, to deny his existence. It is tempting to conclude that if he exists, it is the atheists and agnostics that he loves best, among those with any pretensions to education. For they are the ones who have taken him most seriously. #Quote by Galen Strawson

#54. She had thought of literature all these years (her seclusion, her rank, her sex must be her excuse) as something wild as the wind, hot as fire, swift as lightning; something errant, incalculable, abrupt, and behold, literature was an elderly gentleman in a grey suit talking about duchesses…

Orlando then came to the conclusion (opening half-a-dozen books)…that it would be impolitic in the extreme to wrap a ten-pound note round the sugar tongs when Miss Christina Rossetti came to tea…next (here were half-a-dozen invitations to celebrate centenaries by dining) that literature since it all these dinners must be growing very corpulent; next (she was invited to a score of lectures on the Influence of this upon that; the Classical revival; the Romantic survival, and other titles of the same engaging kind) that literature since it listened to all these lectures must be growing very dry; next (here she attended a reception given by a peeress) that literature since it wore all those fur tippets must be growing very respectable; next (here she visited Carlyle's sound-proof room at Chelsea) that genius since it needed all this coddling must be growing very delicate… #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#55. Most cats don't like water, and despite her pretensions of tigerhood, Julie was no different. Yes, tigers have stripes; so do tabbies. If you want to know the difference, try tossing one of each into your swimming pool. Then I would recommend running. #Quote by Seanan McGuire

#56. Hypocrisy, double standards, and "but nots" are the price of universalist pretensions. Democracy is promoted, but not if it brings Islamic fundamentalists to power; nonproliferation is preached for Iran and Iraq, but not for Israel; free trade is the elixir of economic growth, but not for agriculture; human rights are an issue for China, but not with Saudi Arabia; aggression against oil-owning Kuwaitis is massively repulsed, but not against non-oil-owning Bosnians. Double standards in practice are the unavoidable price of universal standards of principle. #Quote by Samuel P. Huntington

#57. 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. #Quote by Frederick Buechner

#58. Therefore to make pretensions about honoring him more, while not calling people to the most radical, soul-freeing satisfaction in God alone, is self-contradictory. It won't happen. God is glorified in His people by the way we experience him, not merely by the way we think about him. Indeed the devil thinks more true thoughts about God in one day than a saint does in a lifetime, and God is not honored by it. The problem with the devil is not his theology, but his desires. Our chief end is to glorify God, the great Object. We do so fully when we treasure him. desire him, delight in him so supremely that we let goods and kindred go and display his love to the poor and the lost. #Quote by John Piper

#59. He sighed deeply: to fall in love at first sight with this malodorous sleeping girl, with, as far as he could see, no pretensions to beauty or even good looks, was something he had not expected. But falling in love, he had always understood, was unpredictable, and, as far as he was concerned, irrevocable That they hadn't exchanged a word, nor spoken, made no difference. He, heart whole until that minute, and with no intention of marrying until it suited him, had lost that same heart. #Quote by Betty Neels

#60. The proper way is lost to me; my compass spins. I therefore give my entire attention to those works that seem to me most incorruptible: the application of heat, the proportion of seasoning, the arrangement of a plate. When robbed of all pretensions and aspirations, with no proper home nor any knowledge of what discord tomorrow brings, I still may have a pocketful of dignity. The Roman pomp and raiment have fallen away, and I see at last the glory of washed feet and shared bread. #Quote by Eli Brown

#61. I HAVE no patience with the hypothesis occasionally expressed, and often implied, especially in tales written to teach children to be good, that babies are born pretty much alike, and that the sole agencies in creating differences between boy and boy, and man and man, are steady application and moral effort. It is in the most unqualified manner that I object to pretensions of natural equality. The experiences of the nursery, the school, the University, and of professional careers, are a chain of proofs to the contrary. #Quote by Francis Galton

#62. All the pretensions you make of attachment to your Master, and all the devout actions which you may perform, are no recompense for disobedience. #Quote by Charles Haddon Spurgeon

#63. Poetry was not meant to be a workhorse; it was not designed to paint pretty moral pictures of life; it was not brought into being to confuse us with cryptograms, or high platitudes, or pompous pretensions. The poet was meant to be a seer; he was designed to run toward the intensities and magnificences of life, to bathe his hands in reality. But where the mystic ran toward Reality in silence and lost himself in it, the poet as soon as he had experienced it, ran back toward humanity crying the good news and putting it into shimmering webs of words. #Quote by Francis Beauchesne Thornton

#64. The most erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else. #Quote by H.L. Mencken

#65. What do I not owe you! You taught me a lesson, hard indeed at first, but most advantageous. By you, I was properly humbled. I came to you without a doubt of my reception. You showed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased. - Darcy #Quote by Jane Austen

#66. 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. #Quote by John Adams

#67. The worst possible heritage to leave with children: high spiritual pretensions and low performance. #Quote by D. A. Carson

#68. Once we have taken the backward step to an abstract view of our whole system of beliefs, evidence, and justification, and seen that it works only, despite its pretensions, by taking the world largely for granted, we are not in a position to contrast all these appearances with an alternative reality. We cannot shed our ordinary responses, and if we could it would leave us with no means of conceiving a reality of any kind. #Quote by Thomas Nagel

#69. Science can explain what exists in the world, how things work, and what might be in the future. By definition, it has no pretensions to knowing what should be in the future. Only religions and ideologies seek to answer such questions. #Quote by Yuval Noah Harari

#70. I am tired of this city. I am tired of its pagan pretensions and false histories. Hyperion is a poet's world devoid of poetry. Keats itself is a mixture of tawdry, false classicism and mindless, boomtown energy. #Quote by Dan Simmons

#71. Men mistook measurement for understanding. And they always had to put themselves at the center of everything. That was their greatest conceit. The earth is becoming warmer-it must be our fault! The mountain is destroying us-we have not propitiated the gods! It rains too much, it rains too little-a comfort to think that these things are somehow connected to our behavior, that if only we lived a little better, a little more frugally, our virtue would be rewarded. But here was nature, sweeping toward him-unknowable, all-conquering, indifferent-and he saw in her fires the futility of human pretensions. #Quote by Robert Harris

#72. Of all the fads and foibles in the long history of human credulity, scientism in all its varied guises - from fanciful cosmology to evolutionary epistemology and ethics - seems among the more dangerous, both because it pretends to be something very different from what it really is and because it has been accorded widespread and uncritical adherence. Continued insistence on the universal competence of science will serve only to undermine the credibility of science as a whole. The ultimate outcome will be an increase of radical skepticism that questions the ability of science to address even the questions legitimately within its sphere of competence. One longs for a new Enlightenment to puncture the pretensions of this latest superstition.
[The folly of scientism] #Quote by Austin L. Hughes

#73. Then his singing paused, and he stood for a
moment to cry out softly in the vernacular of the region: 'Blest be Adonoi Elohim, King of All, who maketh bread to spring forth from the earth,' in a sort of nasal bleat. The bleat being finished, he sat again, and commenced eating.

The wanderer had come a long way indeed, thought
Brother Francis, who knew of no adjacent realm governed by a monarch with such an unfamiliar name and such strange pretensions. #Quote by Walter M. Miller Jr.

#74. Only secure people can serve. Insecure people are always worrying about how they appear to others. They fear exposure of their weaknesses and hide beneath layers of protective pride and pretensions. The more insecure you are, the more you will want people to serve you, and the more you will need their approval. #Quote by Rick Warren

#75. Civilization is only a pretense; in the crisis, we become mere apes again, forgetting the rational biped of our pretensions and becoming instead the hairy primate at the mouth of the cave, screeching at the enemy, wishing it would go away, fingering the heavy stone that we'll use the moment it comes close enough. #Quote by Orson Scott Card

#76. 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.' #Quote by Parker Palmer

#77. Many skeptics, it is true, are inclined to dismiss the whole procedure [chart reading] as akin to astrology or necromancy; but the sheer weight of its importance in Wall Street requires that its pretensions be examined with some degree of care. #Quote by Benjamin Graham

#78. What offends a great intellect in society is the equality of rights, leading to equality of pretensions, which everyone enjoys; while at the same time, inequality of capacity means a corresponding disparity of social power. So-called good society recognizes every kind of claim but that of intellect, which is a contraband article; and people are expected to exhibit an unlimited amount of patience towards every form of folly and stupidity, perversity and dullness; whilst personal merit has to beg pardon, as it were, for being present, or else conceal itself altogether. Intellectual superiority offends by its very existence, without any desire to do so. The #Quote by Arthur Schopenhauer

#79. When I was young and knew Virginia Woolf slightly, I learned something that startled me - that a person may be ultrasensitive and not warm. She was intensely curious and plied one with questions, teasing, charming questions that made the young person glow at being even for a moment the object of her attention. But I did feel at times as though I were "a specimen American young poet" to be absorbed and filed away in the novelist's store of vicarious experience. Then one had also the daring sense that anything could be said, the sense of freedom that was surely one of the keys to the Bloomsbury ethos, a shared secret amusement at human folly or pretensions. She was immensely kind to have seen me for at least one tea, as she did for some years whenever I was in England, but in all that time I never felt warmth, and this was startling. #Quote by May Sarton

#80. 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. #Quote by J.M. Roberts

#81. Humans - who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals - have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. A sharp distinction between humans and 'animals' is essential if we are to bend them to our will, make them work for us, wear them, eat them - without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret. It is unseemly of us, who often behave so unfeelingly toward other animals, to contend that only humans can suffer. The behavior of other animals renders such pretensions specious. They are just too much like us. #Quote by Carl Sagan

#82. Our treatment of animals and our attitude toward them are crucial not only to any pretensions we have to ethical behavior but the humankind's intellectual and moral evolution. Which is how the human animal is meant to evolve, isn't it? #Quote by Joy Williams

#83. Some of his authors were so mulishly stubborn about altering their own work, one would think he had suggested changing text in the Bible. Amanda was easy to work with, and she did not harbor great pretensions about herself or her writing. In fact, she was relatively modest about her talents, to the extent of appearing surprised and uncomfortable when he praised her.
The plot of 'Unfinished Lady' centered on a young woman who tried to live strictly according to society's rules, yet couldn't make herself accept the rigid confinement of what was considered proper. She made fatal errors in her private life- gambling, taking a lover outside of marriage, having a child out of wedlock- all due to her desire to obtain the elusive happiness she secretly longed for.
Eventually she came to a sordid end, dying of venereal disease, although it was clear that society's harsh judgements had caused her demise fully as much as disease. What fascinated Jack was that Amanda, as the author, had refused to take a position on the heroine's behavior, neither applauding nor condemning it. Clearly she had sympathy for the character, and Jack suspected that the heroine's inner rebelliousness reflected some of Amanda's own feelings. #Quote by Lisa Kleypas

#84. Envy is the most universal passion. We only pride ourselves on the qualities we possess, or think we possess; but we envy the pretensions we have, and those which we have not, and do not even wish for. We envy the greatest qualities and every trifling advantage. We envy the most ridiculous appearance or affectation of superiority. We envy folly and conceit; nay, we go so far as to envy whatever confers distinction of notoriety, even vice and infamy. #Quote by William Hazlitt

#85. Wondrously futile to build splendid buildings, to make music, to sing songs, to print huge books full of colorful birds in the face of the seismic, engulfing indifference of the world - what pretensions humans have! Why bother to make music when the silence and wind are so much larger? Why light lamps when the darkness will inevitably snuff them? #Quote by Anthony Doerr

#86. I expect nothing of man, and disown the race. The only folly is expecting what is never attained; man is most contemptible when compared with his own pretensions. It is better to laugh at man from outside the universe, than to weep for him within. #Quote by H.P. Lovecraft

#87. 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. #Quote by Irving Stone

#88. 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. #Quote by Gian-Carlo Rota

#89. 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. #Quote by H.L. Mencken

#90. With no pretensions of art, Viva Las Vegas, the new Elvis Presley vehicle, is about as pleasant and unimportant as a Banana Split. #Quote by Howard Thompson

#91. Man - despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication, and his many accomplishments - owes his existence to a six inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains. #Quote by Paul Harvey

#92. 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. #Quote by Adam Smith

#93. We have always pretensions to fame which, in our own hearts, we know to be disputable. #Quote by Samuel Johnson

#94. I wish Obama would focus on governing the United States and would forget his country's imperialist pretensions. #Quote by Hugo Chavez

#95. You showed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased. #Quote by Jane Austen

#96. To the Public, for the indulgent ear it has inclined to a plain tale with few pretensions. #Quote by Charlotte Bronte

#97. 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. #Quote by Charles Caleb Colton

#98. Just make sure your intentions are not pretensions. #Quote by Emil Ludwig

#99. Information has always been power, now it is also wealth. Nonmaterial and, with the aid of modern technology, extremely mobile, information can escape government control far more easily than other forms of capital. Draconian or even merely bureaucratic systems for controlling the flow or use of information tend to destroy or waste it. Economically useful information is usually original, innovative, or at least timely, nuanced, precise, complex, and challenging. Bureaucracies and governments live for delay, blunt originality, oppose innovation, abhor nuance. Governments are good at governing matter but everywhere misrule mind, especially the best and most productive minds, minds that are frustrated and demoralized by the pretensions of the merely powerful. #Quote by Walter B. Wriston

#100. Need I point out that, despite the old saw about uneasy heads and crowns, it is nevertheless safer to be publicly a king than it is to be a pretender in hiding? A king can usually abdicate to save his neck; a pretender may renounce his pretensions but it makes his neck no safer - less so, in fact; it leaves him naked to his enemies. #Quote by Robert A. Heinlein

#101. Poetry is a kind of lying, necessarily. To profit the poet or beauty. But also in that truth may be told only so. Those who, admirably, refuse to falsify (as those who will not risk pretensions) are excluded from saying even so much. Degas said he didn't paint what he saw, but what would enable them to see the thing he had. #Quote by Jack Gilbert

#102. 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. #Quote by Greg Bear

#103. I always liked to write and had fun writing, but I didn't have any pretensions about being a writer. I liked to read and liked to putz around and write little stories or poems, but my thing was sports. #Quote by John Edgar Wideman

#104. As I grew up I developed some literary pretensions myself, and studied and wrote meticulous poetry informed by poets as diverse as T. S. Eliot, Rimbaud, and Judy Grahn. #Quote by Jo Weldon

#105. 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. #Quote by Don Henley

#106. That politeness which we put on, in order to keep the assuming and the presumptuous at a proper distance will generally succeed. But it sometimes happens that these obtrusive characters are on such excellent terms with themselves that they put down this very politeness to the score of their own great merits and high pretensions, meeting the coldness of our reserve with a ridiculous condescension of familiarity, in order to set us at ease with ourselves. #Quote by Charles Caleb Colton

#107. Time now to consider the compacts that hold the world together: the compact between ruler and ruled, and that between husband and wife. Both of these arrangements rest on a sedulous devotion the one to the interests of the other. The master and husband protect and provide; the wife and servant obey. Above masters, above husbands, God rules all. He counts up our petty rebellions, our human follies. He reaches out his long arm, hand bunched into a fist.
It is time to say what England is, her scope and boundaries: not to count and measure her harbor defenses and border walls, but to estimate her capacity for self-rule. It is time to say what a king is, and what trust and guardianship he owes his people: what protection from foreign incursions moral or physical, what freedom from the pretensions of those who would like to tell an Englishman how to speak to his God. #Quote by Hilary Mantel

#108. Men indulge those opinions and practices that favor their pretensions. #Quote by Roger L'Estrange

#109. We took the liberty to make some enquiries concerning the ground of their pretensions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury, and observed that we considered all mankind as our friends who had done us no wrong, nor had given us any provocation.

The Ambassador [of Tripoli] answered us that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.

{Letter from the commissioners, John Adams & Thomas Jefferson, to John Jay, 28 March 1786} #Quote by Thomas Jefferson

#110. Children, teenagers, and young adults frequently attempt to duplicate their cult hero's mannerisms. Sometimes when we observe youngsters attempting to emulate the gestures and behaviors of a celebrity whom they admire, we state that they are putting on airs or engaging in pretensions. Adults tend to fob off such pretentious behavior as a frivolous act engaged in by children. In actuality, pretentious behavior is an important learning rubric for behavior and character formation. Imitation is more than a form of flattery. When young people mimic admired celebrities they are displaying telling behavior regarding what subjects spikes their interest and this in turn might provide clues to their future vocational and recreational activities. By engaging in mimicry, we are able to audition our future self. Just as many athletes begin in their youth attempting to impersonate the style of their sports idols, young people universally attempt to copy the mannerisms and behaviorisms of people whom they respect. Mimicry is one way that people feel safe exploring what persona they wish to adopt. How many rock stars and other successful people endorsed the mantra, 'Fake it 'till you make it. #Quote by Kilroy J. Oldster

#111. A certain kind of courage is required to follow what truly calls to us; why else would so many choose to live within false certainties and pretensions of security? If genuine treasures were easy to find this world would be a different place. If the path of dreams were easy to walk or predictable to follow many more would go that route. The truth is that most prefer the safer paths in life even if they know that their souls are called another way. #Quote by Michael Meade

#112. 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. #Quote by Dizzee Rascal

#113. And as I looked, it became very clear that this five-and-ten-cent ship was in some way connected with human pretensions. This suffocating interior of a dime-store ship was my own personal self; these gimcrack mobiles of tin and plastic were my personal contributions to the universe. #Quote by Aldous Huxley

#114. One of the many remarkable things about K is the equal ease with which he talks to a Swami or a Western scientist, an industrial millionaire or a Prime Minister. He has discoursed on meditation with the Dalai Lama and would have no apprehension in conversing with any of the world's great philosophers, yet he is undoubtedly a shy, diffident man who shuns ordinary conversation, has read very little (and that little forgotten) and who has no intellectual pretensions. The answer to this anomaly is, I think, that he perceives some truth as clearly as he can see his own hand. No counter-argument can disturb such a clear vision. While others discuss and argue about the theory of X, K actually holds X like an apple in his hand. #Quote by Mary Lutyens

#115. I recollected that [the rattlesnake's] eye excelled in brightness, that of any other animal, and that she has no eye-lids. She may therefore be esteemed an emblem of vigilance. She never begins an attack, nor, when once engaged, ever surrenders: She is therefore an emblem of magnanimity and true courage. As if anxious to prevent all pretensions of quarreling with her, the weapons with which nature has furnished her, she conceals in the roof of her mouth, so that, to those who are unacquainted with her, she appears to be a most defenseless animal; and even when those weapons are shown and extended for her defense, they appear weak and contemptible; but their wounds however small, are decisive and fatal. Conscious of this, she never wounds 'till she has generously given notice, even to her enemy, and cautioned him against the danger of treading on her. #Quote by Benjamin Franklin

#116. I would advise puppeteering for any artist. It's a way to break down pretensions. It's a sculpture that can talk. It's a painting that can talk. And it's pure play. I think every artist needs to stay in touch with the idea of playing. The artist should always be playing, always. All art is performance. #Quote by Wayne White

#117. The merits and services of Christianity have been industriously extolled by its hired advocates. Every Sunday its praises are sounded from myriads of pulpits. It enjoys the prestige of an ancient establishment and the comprehensive support of the State. It has the ear of rulers and the control of education. Every generation is suborned in its favor. Those who dissent from it are losers, those who oppose it are ostracised; while in the past, for century after century, it has replied to criticism with imprisonment, and to scepticism with the dungeon and the stake. By such means it has induced a general tendency to allow its pretensions without inquiry and its beneficence without proof. #Quote by Joseph Mazzini Wheeler

#118. Such pretensions to nicety in experiments of this nature, are truly laughable! They will be telling us some day of the WEIGHT of the MOON, even to drams, scruples and grains-nay, to the very fraction of a grain!-I wish there were infallible experiments to ascertain the quantum of brains each man possesses, and every man's integrity and candour:-This is a desideratum in science which is most of all wanted. #Quote by Robert Sutton Harrington

#119. When we hear the ancient bells growling on a Sunday morning we ask ourselves: Is it really possible! This, for a jew, crucified two thousand years ago, who said he was God's son? The proof of such a claim is lacking. Certainly the Christian religion is an antiquity projected into our times from remote prehistory; and the fact that the claim is believed - whereas one is otherwise so strict in examining pretensions - is perhaps the most ancient piece of this heritage. A god who begets children with a mortal woman; a sage who bids men work no more, have no more courts, but look for the signs of the impending end of the world; a justice that accepts the innocent as a vicarious sacrifice; someone who orders his disciples to drink his blood; prayers for miraculous interventions; sins perpetrated against a god, atoned for by a god; fear of a beyond to which death is the portal; the form of the cross as a symbol in a time that no longer knows the function and ignominy of the cross -- how ghoulishly all this touches us, as if from the tomb of a primeval past! Can one believe that such things are still believed? #Quote by Friedrich Nietzsche

#120. I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight. #Quote by Zadie Smith

#121. That all pretensions to being self-made hide the reciprocal truth, that we have unpayable debts to the world around us, to our community, to our forebears, to the ancients, to nature, to the gods. #Quote by Lewis Hyde

#122. It may be debated as to whether the antichrist is seen as a superhuman figure (in Revelation "Mr. 666" is seen as having divine pretensions but actually being quite human, being the emperor), but it is quite clear in 2 John that the antichrists are false teachers who are contemporaries of our author. #Quote by Ben Witherington III

#123. Masterpieces, not always distinguished or distinguishable among all the works with pretensions to genius, are scattered about the world like warning notices in a mine field. #Quote by Andrei Tarkovsky

#124. Homer is universally allowed to have had the greatest Invention of any writer whatever. The praise of judgment Virgil has justly contested with him, and others may have their pretensions as to particular excellencies; but his invention remains yet unrivalled. Nor is it a wonder if he has ever been acknowledged the greatest of poets, who most excelled in that which is the very foundation of poetry. It is the invention that in different degrees distinguishes all great geniuses: the utmost stretch of human study, learning, and industry, which masters everything besides, can never attain to this. It furnishes Art with all her materials, and without it, judgment itself can at best but steal wisely: for Art is only like a prudent steward, that lives on managing the riches of Nature. Whatever praises may be given to works of judgment, there is not even a single beauty in them but is owing to the invention: as in the most regular gardens, however Art may carry the greatest appearance, there is not a plant or flower but is the gift of Nature. The first can only reduce the beauties of the latter into a more obvious figure, which the common eye may better take in, and is therefore more entertained with them. And perhaps the reason why most critics are inclined to prefer a judicious and methodical genius to a great and fruitful one, is, because they find it easier for themselves to pursue their observations through an uniform and bounded walk of Art, than to comprehend the vast and vario #Quote by Alexander Pope

#125. Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man. #Quote by Frank Herbert

#126. He who caused us to be told that we must prove the spirits, would not have done so unless he knew that we had infallible rules to tell the holy from the false spirit. We have such rules, and nobody denies it. But these deceivers produce rules which they can falsify and adapt to their pretensions, in order that, having rules in their hands, they may gain the credit of being masters in their craft by a visible sign under pretext of which they can form a faith and a religion such as they have imagined. #Quote by Francis De Sales

#127. Religious fermentation is always a symptom of the intellectual vigor of a society; and it is only when they forget that they are hypotheses and put on rationalistic and authoritative pretensions, that our faiths do harm. #Quote by William James

#128. O Christian, thou hast need to pray this prayer. But I think I hear you saying, "Is thy servant a dog, that I should do this thing?" So said Hazael, when the prophet told him that he would slay his master; but he went home and took a wet cloth and spread it over his master's face and choked him, and did the next day the sin which he abhorred before. Think it not enough to abhor sin, you may yet fall into it. Say not, "I never can be drunken, for I have such an abhorrence of drunkenness;" thou mayest fall where thou art most secure. Say not, "I can never blaspheme God, for I have never done so in my life;" take care; you may yet swear most profanely. Job might have said, "I will never curse the day of my birth;" but he lived to do it. He was a patient man; he might have said, "I will never murmur; though he slay me, yet will I trust in him;" and yet he lived to wish that the day were darkness wherein he was brought forth. Boast not, then, O Christian; by faith thou standest. "Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall."
But if this need to be the prayer of the best, how ought it to be the prayer of you and me? If the highest saint must pray it, O mere moralist, thou hast good need to utter it. And ye who have begun to sin, who make no pretensions to piety, how much need is there for you to pray that you may be kept from presumptuously rebelling against God. #Quote by Charles Haddon Spurgeon

#129. 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. #Quote by Madeleine De Souvre, Marquise De ...

#130. 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. #Quote by Joan Fontcuberta

#131. Whoever is writing in the United States is using the American Dream as an ironical pole of his story. People elsewhere tend to accept, to a far greater degree anyway, that the conditions of life are hostile to mans pretensions. #Quote by Arthur Miller

#132. A person only experiences the fathomlessly beautiful and mysterious particulars that constitute reality by giving up the distorting spectacles of our egotistical appetites and repulsive pretensions, shedding artificial attachments, living without grand illusions, and free of deceptive delusions. #Quote by Kilroy J. Oldster

#133. Reason should take on anew the most difficult of all its tasks, namely, that of self-knowledge, and to institute a court of justice, by which reason may secure its rightful claims while dismissing all its groundless pretensions, and this not by mere decrees but according to its own eternal and unchangeable laws; and this court is none other than the critique of pure reason itself. #Quote by Immanuel Kant

#134. ...Hell is the home of the unreal and of the seekers for happiness. It is the only refuge from heaven, which is, as I tell you, the home of the masters of reality, and from earth, which is the home of the slaves of reality. The earth is a nursery in which men and women play at being heroes and heroines, saints and sinners; but they are dragged down from their fool's paradise by their bodies: hunger and cold and thirst, age and decay and disease, death above all, make them slaves of reality: thrice a day meals must be eaten and digested: thrice a century a new generation must be engendered: ages of faith, of romance, and of science are all driven at last to have but one prayer, "Make me a healthy animal." But here you escape this tyranny of the flesh; for here you are not an animal at all: you are a ghost, an appearance, an illusion, a convention, deathless, ageless: in a word, bodiless. There are no social questions here, no political questions, no religious questions, best of all, perhaps, no sanitary questions. Here you call your appearance beauty, your emotions love, your sentiments heroism, your aspirations virtue, just as you did on earth; but here there are no hard facts to contradict you, no ironic contrast of your needs with your pretensions, no human comedy, nothing but a perpetual romance, a universal melodrama. As our German friend put it in his poem, "the poetically nonsensical here is good sense; and the Eternal Feminine draws us ever upward and on... #Quote by George Bernard Shaw

#135. The greatest human virtue bears no proportion to human vanity. We always think ourselves better than we are, and are generally desirous that others should think us still better than we think ourselves. To praise us for actions or dispositions which deserve praise is not to confer a benefit, but to pay a tribute. We have always pretensions to fame which, in our own hearts, we know to be disputable, and which we are desirous to strengthen by a new suffrage; we have always hopes which we suspect to be fallacious, and of which we eagerly snatch at every confirmation. #Quote by Samuel Johnson

#136. Steeped like a teabag in aristocratic pretensions ... #Quote by Philip Roth

#137. 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. #Quote by Yves Saint-Laurent

#138. I was really in Italy. Not Maya Angelou, the person of pretensions and ambitions, but me, Marguerite Johnson, who had read about Verona and the sad lovers while growing up in a dusty Southern village poorer and more tragic than the historic town in which I now stood. I was so excited at the incredible turn of events which had brought me from a past of rejection, of slammed doors and blind alleys, of dead-end streets and culs-de-sac, into the bright sun of Italy, into a town made famous by one of the world's greatest writers. I #Quote by Maya Angelou

#139. It is vain to try and hide a bad spirit from the eyes of them who are spiritual, for it will show itself in speaking and in writing as well as in all other conduct, it is also useless to make great pretensions when the heart is not right before God, for God looks at the heart, and where the heart is not right the Lord will expose it to the view of the faithful. #Quote by Joseph Smith Jr.

#140. I have no pretensions whatever to that kind of elegance which consists in tormenting a respectable man. #Quote by Jane Austen

#141. Nature is the birthright of everyone on Earth. The millions of species we have allowed to survive are our phylogenetic kin. Their long-term history is our long-term history. Despite all our fantasies and pretensions, we always have been and will remain a biological species tied to this particular biological world. #Quote by Edward O. Wilson

#142. I make no pretensions to 'objectivity,' a fraudulent concept in an era of industrialized and politicized science in which intellectual mercenaries too often serve power and greed, the ambitions of competing nation-states, or the requirements of commerce. #Quote by Hazel Henderson

#143. [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. #Quote by Sydney Smith

#144. BECAUSE OF PIETY'S PENCHANT for taking itself too seriously, theology does well to nurture a modest, unguarded sense of comedy. Some droll sensibility is required to keep in due proportion the pompous pretensions of the study of divinity. I invite the kind of laughter that wells up not from cynicism about reflection on God but from the ironic contradictions accompanying such reflection. Theology is intrinsically funny. This comes from glimpsing the incongruity of humans thinking about God. I have often laughed at myself as these sentences went through their tortuous stages of formation. I invite you to look for the comic dimension of divinity that stalks every page. #Quote by Thomas C. Oden

#145. To a superior race of being the pretensions of mankind to extraordinary sanctity and virtue must seem ... ridiculous. #Quote by William Hazlitt

#146. The Asian idea is that what remains behind after death by violence is less the murdered person his or herself than an echo created by the moment of the person's death--a rip in the fabric of space and time itself. A doppelganger husk, ectoplasm with pretensions. Not "so and so's ghost" so much as just a ghost. Or just ..."ghost. #Quote by Gemma Files

#147. Like any overt school of mysticism, a movement seeking to achieve a vicious goal has to invoke the higher mysteries of an incomprehensible authority. An unread and unreadable book serves this purpose. It does not count on men's intelligence, but on their weaknesses, pretensions and fears. It is not a tool of enlightenment, but of intellectual intimidation. It is not aimed at the reader's understanding, but at his inferiority complex.
An intelligent man will reject such a book with contemptuous indignation, refusing to waste his time on untangling what he perceives to be gibberish - which is part of the book's technique: the man able to refute its arguments will not (unless he has the endurance of an elephant and the patience of a martyr). A young man of average intelligence - particularly a student of philosophy or of political science - under a barrage of authoritative pronouncements acclaiming the book as "scholarly," "significant," "profound," will take the blame for his failure to understand. More often than not, he will assume that the book's theory has been scientifically proved and that he alone is unable to grasp it; anxious, above all, to hide his inability, he will profess agreement, and the less his understanding, the louder his agreement - while the rest of the class are going through the same mental process. Most of them will accept the book's doctrine, reluctantly and uneasily, and lose their intellectual integrity, condemning themselves to a chronic fog of #Quote by Ayn Rand

#148. Why do you have to make everyone hate you? (Talon)
What? You want to be my friend now, Celt? If I clean up my act, will you be my buddy? (Zarek)
You're such an asshole. (Talon)
Yeah, but at least I know what I am. I have no pretensions. You don't know if you're a Druid, a Dark-Hunter, or a playboy. You lost yourself a long time ago in the dark hole where you buried the parts of you that once made you human. (Zarek)
You are lecturing me on humanity? (Talon)
Ironic as hell, isn't it? (Zarek) #Quote by Sherrilyn Kenyon

#149. We inhabit a universe where atoms are made in the centers of stars; where each second a thousand suns are born; where life is sparked by sunlight and lightning in the airs and waters of youthful planets; where the raw material for biological evolution is sometimes made by the explosion of a star halfway across the Milky Way; where a thing as beautiful as a galaxy is formed a hundred billion times - a Cosmos of quasars and quarks, snowflakes and fireflies, where there may be black holes and other universe and extraterrestrial civilizations whose radio messages are at this moment reaching the Earth. How pallid by comparison are the pretensions of superstition and pseudoscience; how important it is for us to pursue and understand science, that characteristically human endeavor. #Quote by Carl Sagan

#150. Psychoanalysis will fade away just as mesmerism and phrenology did, and for the same reason - its exploded pretensions will deprive it of recruits #Quote by Frederick Crews

#151. The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform ... But it is likely to exert an indirect and reciprocal influence on science itself. #Quote by Ada Lovelace

#152. Moreover, probably owing to excessive self-consciousness, perhaps as the result of the generally unfortunate cast of my personality, there existed between my thoughts and feelings, and the expression of those feelings and thoughts, a sort of inexplicable, irrational, and utterly insuperable barrier; and whenever I made up my mind to overcome this obstacle by force, to break down this barrier, my gestures, the expression of my face, my whole being, took on an appearance of painful constraint. I not only seemed, I positively became unnatural and affected. I was conscious of this myself, and hastened to shrink back into myself. Then a terrible commotion was set up within me. I analysed myself to the last thread, compared myself with others, recalled the slightest glances, smiles, words of the people to whom I had tried to open myself out, put the worst construction on everything, laughed vindictively at my own pretensions to 'be like every one else,' - and suddenly, in the midst of my laughter, collapsed utterly into gloom, sank into absurd dejection, and then began again as before - went round and round, in fact, like a squirrel on its wheel. Whole days were spent in this harassing, fruitless exercise. #Quote by Ivan Turgenev

#153. In walking, far from any vehicle or machine, from any mediation, I am replaying the earthly human condition, embodying once again man's inborn, essential destitution. That is why humility is not humiliating: it just makes vain pretensions fall away, and thus nudges us towards authenticity. #Quote by Frederic Gros

#154. people to ourselves rather than Jesus, and then wonder why power has left the pulpit and why the deep theological treasures of some of the old hymns have degenerated into songs that exalt us above the glory of our Creator. Despite our pretensions, our pride grows #Quote by Matt Boswell

#155. We all know that any emotional bias
irrespective of truth or falsity
can be implanted by suggestion in the emotions of the young, hence the inherited traditions of an orthodox community are absolutely without evidential value ... If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences. With such an honest and inflexible openness to evidence, they could not fail to receive any real truth which might be manifesting itself around them. The fact that religionists do not follow this honourable course, but cheat at their game by invoking juvenile quasi-hypnosis, is enough to destroy their pretensions in my eyes even if their absurdity were not manifest in every other direction. #Quote by H.P. Lovecraft