Pretext Quotes - page 5
How oft in schoolboy-days, from the school's sway
Have I run forth to Nature as to a friend, -
With some pretext of o'erwrought sight, to spend
My school-time in green meadows far away!
Careless of summoning bell, or clocks that strike,
I marked with flowers the minutes of my day.
Frederick Goddard Tuckerman
For most of the time from his first election until his 2000 presidential campaign he was a reliable conservative Republican: pro-defense, anti-tax, anti-abortion, solid on social issues and the culture wars. But he was never a team player, never popular with his Republican colleagues, with whom he publicly quarreled on the slightest pretext, which made him seem more independent. It could just as easily be that he was more selfish. In high school, McCain's nicknames included "McNasty,” and for more than two decades, the overriding majority of his Senate colleagues, in both parties, have repaid his angry outbursts against them with active and unrelenting dislike.
John McCain
Nationalism is always an effort in a direction opposite to that of the principle which creates nations. The former is exclusive in tendency, the latter inclusive. In periods of consolidation, nationalism has a positive value, and is a lofty standard. But in Europe everything is more than consolidated, and nationalism is nothing but a mania, a pretext to escape from the necessity of inventing something new, some great enterprise.
José Ortega y Gasset
Domitian of Galatia, formerly bishop of Ancyra... in the book which he wrote to Vigilius, where he is complaining of those who contradicted the doctrine of Origen,--who maintained that the souls of men had pre-existed in some state of blessedness before they came into bodies, and that all those who were doomed to the eternal punishment should, together with the devil and his angels, be restored to their former state of blessedness,--he says, They have hastily run out to anathematize most holy and glorious teachers on account of those doctrines which have been advanced concerning pre-existence and restitution; and this indeed under pretext of Origen, but thereby anathematizing all those saints who were before and have been after him.
Origen
I have been reminded in recent months of that nearly three-hour session with Mr. Putin as he has massed troops on the border with neighboring Ukraine. After calling Ukrainian statehood a fiction in a bizarre televised address, he issued a decree recognizing the independence of two separatist-held regions in Ukraine and sending troops there.
Mr. Putin's revisionist and absurd assertion that Ukraine was "entirely created by Russia” and effectively robbed from the Russian empire is fully in keeping with his warped worldview. Most disturbing to me: It was his attempt to establish the pretext for a full-scale invasion.
Should he invade, it will be a historic error.
Madeleine Albright
... the treatment he experienced in England previous to his last departure from it. But I think he does not sufficiently make allowance for the envy and jealousy which prompted people to seize on his separation from Lady Byron as a pretext for attacking him with a thousand slanders, to which her unbroken silence on the cause of their separation lent but too much colour. Byron attributes the insults he received to a false system of morality in England, which condemned him without proof, and intruded itself into a domestic disagreement in which not even friends are deemed authorized to interfere; instead of ascribing them to what is much more likely to be the true cause, an envenomed jealousy of his genius, and the success with which its fruits have been crowned. Other separations in high life have taken place, without either husband or wife being exposed to persecution;..
Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington
September 11, 2001 marks the onslaught of the "Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT), used as a pretext and a justification by the US and its NATO allies to carry out a "war without borders”, a global war of conquest. At eleven o'clock, on the morning of September 11, the Bush administration had already announced that Al Qaeda was responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC) and the Pentagon. This assertion was made prior... an in depth police investigation. CIA Director George Tenet stated that same morning that Osama bin Laden had the capacity to plan "multiple attacks with little or no warning.”... The tragic events of 9/11 provided the required justification to wage war on Afghanistan on "humanitarian grounds”, with the full support of World public opinion and the endorsement of the "international community”.
Michel Chossudovsky
