#pretension

Pretensions to moral superiority are devastatingly destructive. ↗

— Mary Douglas

#moral #pretensions #superiority

What makes me mad is arrogance, pretension, putting on airs. ↗

— David Duchovny

#arrogance #mad #makes #me #pretension

In every commercial state, notwithstanding any pretension to equal rights, the exaltation of a few must depress the many. ↗

— Adam Ferguson

#commercial #depress #equal #equal rights #every

In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability. ↗

— John Kenneth Galbraith

#coexist #deep #deep desire #desire #economics

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. ↗

— J. M. Roberts

#authority #cannons #everywhere #further #greatest

Science makes no pretension to eternal truth or absolute truth. ↗

— E. T. Bell

#absolute truth #eternal #makes #pretension #science

The middle class is so funny, it's the class I know best, and it's the class where you find the most pretension, so that's what makes the middle classes so funny. ↗

— J. K. Rowling

#class #classes #find #funny #i

...what goes on inside believers is mysterious. So far as it can be guessed at - if for some reason you wanted to guess at it - it appears to be a kind of anxious pretending, a kind of continual, nervous resistance to reality. It looks as if, to a believer, things can never be allowed just to be what they are. They always have to be translated, moralised - given an unnecessary and rather sentimental extra meaning. A sunset can't just be part of the mixed magnificence and cruelty and indifference of the world; it has to be a blessing. A meal has to be a present you're grateful for, even if it came from Tesco and the ingredients cost you £7.38. Sex can't be the spectrum of experiences you get used to as an adult, from occasional earthquake through to mild companionable buzz; it has to be, oh dear oh dear, a special thing that happens when mummies and daddies love each other very much... Our fingers must be in our ears all the time - lalala, I can't hear you - just to keep out the plain sound of the real world. The funny thing is that to me it's exactly the other way around. In my experience, it's belief that involves the most uncompromising attention to the nature of things of which you are capable. It's belief which demands that you dispense with illusion after illusion, while contemporary common sense requires continual, fluffy pretending. Pretending that might as well be systematic, it's so thoroughly incentivised by our culture. ↗

— Francis Spufford

#unapologetic #experience

He(Prophet Muhammad) was Caesar and Pope in one; but he was Pope without Pope's pretensions, Caesar without the legions of Caesar: without a standing army, without a bodyguard, without a palace, without a fixed revenue; if ever any man had the right to say that he ruled by the right divine, it was Muhammad, for he had all the power without its instruments and without its supports. ↗

— Reverend B. Smith

#atheist #bodyguard #caesar #christian #divine

We are in a position of financial and social power, and we could be agents of change in our society. Without pretension, I believe we could be a nice little gardener who takes care of the garden, and hopefully our neighbor will do the same. Then, maybe we'll achieve a better world. ↗

— Guy Laliberte

#agents #believe #better #better world #care