The mark of the man of the world is absence of pretension. He does not make a speech; he takes a low… — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
“I was going to stop pretending that just because we were in ministry we were perfect. I was tired of wearing the… — Anna Aquino Copy Share Image
I grew up reading comic books, pulp books, mystery and science fiction and fantasy. I'm a geek; I make no pretensions otherwise.… — David S. Goyer Copy Share Image
The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.… — Ada Lovelace Copy Share Image
The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon… — Frank Herbert Copy Share Image
I make no pretensions to 'objectivity,' a fraudulent concept in an era of industrialized and politicized science in which intellectual mercenaries too… — Hazel Henderson Copy Share Image
For with all our pretension to enlightenment, are we not now a talking, desultory, rather than a meditative generation? — John Campbell Shairp Copy Share Image
The humorous writer professes to awaken and direct your love, your pity, your kindness--your scorn for untruth, pretension, imposture....He takes upon himself… — Mark Twain Copy Share Image
Few of those who fill the world with books, have any pretensions to the hope either of pleasing or instructing. They have… — Samuel Johnson Copy Share Image
Pretension almost always overdoes the original, and hence exposes itself. — Hosea Ballou Copy Share Image
I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight. — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
News-hunters have great leisure, with little thought; much petty ambition to be considered intelligent, without any other pretension than being able to… — Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann Copy Share Image
Perhaps I had better inform my Protestant readers that the famous Dogma of Papal Infallibility is by far the most modest pretension… — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
The individual or the group which organizes any society, however social its intentions or pretensions, arrogates an inordinate portion of social privilege… — Reinhold Niebuhr Copy Share Image
Vanity Fair is a very vain, wicked, foolish place, full of all sorts of humbugs and falsenesses and pretensions. — William Makepeace Thackeray Copy Share Image
In the middle of the next century, when the literary establishment will reflect the multicultural makeup of this country and not be… — Ishmael Reed Copy Share Image
I used to think that once a writer became a man of letters, if only for a half hour, he was done… — Dylan Thomas Copy Share Image
I think people can stand to take themselves just a little less seriously. I'm fighting the war against pretension. — Kesha Copy Share Image
Affectation is an awkward and forced imitation of what should be genuine and easy, wanting the beauty that accompanies what is natural. — John Locke Copy Share Image
What encouragement the apostle holds out to us. O my friends, that we might leave all our pretensions, and come to the… — Elias Hicks Copy Share Image
A snob is that man or woman who is always pretending to be something better--especially richer or more fashionable--than he is. — William Makepeace Thackeray Copy Share Image
Pretension may sit still, but cannot act. Pretension never feigned an act of real greatness. Pretension never wrote an Iliad, nordrove back… — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
To despise theory is to have the excessively vain pretension to do without knowing what one does, and to speak without knowing… — Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle Copy Share Image
Most good writing is clear, vigorous, honest, alive, sensuous, appropriate, unsentimental, rhythmic, without pretension, fresh, metaphorical, evocative in sound, economical, authoritative, surprising,… — Ken Macrorie Copy Share Image
The literary world is so full of pretension, and there's such an enormous gap between how seriously poets take themselves and how… — Billy Collins Copy Share Image
