Pretension Quotes - page 3

The mark of the man of the world is absence of pretension. He does not make a speech he takes a low business-tone, avoids all brag, is nobody, dresses plainly, promises not at all, performs much, speaks in monosyllables, hugs his fact. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
This film is extremely visual. It is difficult to describe in words without running the risk of losing or boring the reader. I have come up with a simplified summary, therefore, like a readers guide, which will conjure up the images in as few words as possible : - the beginning is Leon: The Professional - the middle is Inception - the end is 2001: A Space Odyssey Don't interpret this as pretension on my part, merely a visual, emotional and philosophical point of reference.
Luc Besson
Marius and Cosette did not ask where this would lead them. They looked at themselves as arrived. It is a strange pretension for men to ask that love should lead them somewhere.
Victor Hugo
Pretension almost always overdoes the original, and hence exposes itself.
Hosea Ballou
An ideological movement is a collection of people many of whom could hardly bake a cake, fix a car, sustain a friendship or a marriage, or even do a quadratic equation, yet they believe they know how to rule the world. The university, in which it is possible to combine theoretical pretension with comprehensive ineptitude, has become the natural habitat of the ideological enthusiast. A kind of adventure playground, carefully insulated from reality in order to prevent absent-minded professors from bumping into things as they explore transcendental realms, has become the institutional base for civilizational self-hatred.
Kenneth Minogue
I come from very common stock, and I've always been uncomfortable with pretension and all the forms it can take, including disingenuous broadcasting.
Tom Bodett
Americans are generally very self-sufficient and I think generally averse to pretension, just as I am.
Tom Bodett
Teach us that wealth is not elegance; that profusion is not magnificence; and that splendour is not beauty. Teach us that taste is a talisman which can do greater wonders than the millions of the loanmonger. Teach us that to vie is not to rival, and to imitate not to invent. Teach us that pretension is a bore. Teach us that wit is excessively good-natured, and, like champagne, not only sparkles, but is sweet. Teach us the vulgarity of malignity. Teach us that envy spoils our complexions, and that anxiety destroys our figure.
Benjamin Disraeli
There was no better way to spend an evening than to hear my brother swapping Irish stories with Tip. Jack loved him, and so did all the Kennedys. I'm sure that in heaven now, Tip is leading them all in a glorious round of "I'll Be With You in Apple Blossom Time." It may be apple blossom time up there, but here on earth, a beautiful blossom is gone. Still, the Speaker will always be with us in our mind's eye, in the hearts of thousands of his friends, and the tens of millions more who never met him, but whose lives are better today and whose hopes are brighter because he was a Speaker who spoke so powerfully for them. In an era so much pretension and superficiality and polldriven decisions in public life, Tip O'Neill was the real thing, and we were fortunate to have him as our leader.
Ted Kennedy
It will hardly be expected from a work making so little pretension as this to scientific accuracy and completeness, that the remarks which my plan necessarily leads me to make, concerning the aborigines of western America, should be either critical or comprehensive. ...I propose, in the few following pages, to record such facts as shall seem to be most novel, and to corroborate, in my humble measure, occasional others which have before been related.
Josiah Gregg
All three spoke in the kind of down-home, common-as-flies style that is the lingua franca of great scientists, conveying a contempt for pretension, a contempt for cant, a delight in common sense, combined with uncommon curiosity about what is really there. (Jonathan Weiner)
Being is either open to, or dependent on, what is more than being, namely, the care for being, or it is a cul-de-sac, to be explained in terms of self-sufficiency. The weakness of the first possibility is in its reference to a mystery; the weakness of the second possibility is in its pretension to offer a rational explanation. Nature, the sum of its laws, may be sufficient to explain in its own terms how facts behave within nature; it does not explain why they behave at all. Some tacit assumptions of the theory of insufficiency remain problematic.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
If one strand in the heritage of the Sixties was high-cultural pretension, the other, its intimate inversion, was a hardening crust of knowing cynicism. The relative innocence of rock and roll was increasingly displaced by media-wise pop bands whose stock in trade was a derisive appropriation and degradation of the style forged by their immediate precursors. Much as popular romances and tabloid journalism had once fastened on to mass literacy for commercial advantage, so ‘punk' rock appeared in the Seventies in order to exploit the market for popular music. Presented as ‘counter-cultural' it was in fact parasitic upon mainstream culture, invoking violent images and radical language for frequently mercenary ends.
Tony Judt
As to the pretension of civilized persons to admire gems or gold for their intrinsic beauty apart from their value, I suspect that was a more or less unconscious sham.
Edward Bellamy