Pretext Quotes

1. "As pessoas não sabem nada a respeito de metáforas. É uma palavra que vende bem, porque tem boa aparência. "Metáfora": o último dos analfabetos sabe que vem do grego. Muito chique, essas etimologias fajutas - realmente fajutas: quando se conhece a assustadora polissemia da preposição meta e as neutralidades factofórum do verbo phero, seria preciso, para ser sincero, concluir que a palavra "metáfora" significa absolutamente qualquer coisa.(Pretextat Tach, Higiene do Assassino)"
Author: Amélie Nothomb

2. "En la vida se tienen pretextos o resultados. Hay quienes piensan que ambas cosas valen lo mismo."
Author: Andrew Matthews

3. "If the program goes off track again due to recession, this should not become a pretext for the imposition of more austerity measures."
Author: Antonis Samaras

4. "There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject's sake, and those who write for writing's sake. [...] The truth is that when an author begins to write for the sake of covering paper, he is cheating the reader; because he writes under the pretext that he has something to say."
Author: Arthur Schopenhauer

5. "Authentic faith leads us to treat others with unconditional seriousness and to a loving reverence for the mystery of the human personality. Authentic Christianity should lead to maturity, personality, and reality. It should fashion whole men and women living lives of love and communion. False, manhandled religion produces the opposite effect. Whenever religion shows contempt or disregards the rights of persons, even under the noblest pretexts, it draws us away from reality and God."
Author: Brennan Manning

6. "Give no poor fool the pretext to think ye are claiming knowledge of what no mortal knows."
Author: C.S. Lewis

7. "So this is the way we live now: conditioned by the awareness that no North Korean provocation, however egregious, can be confronted, lest it furnish the occasion or pretext for something truly barbarous and insane."
Author: Christopher Hitchens

8. "The pretext for survival, is a major cause for the vices and atrocities"
Author: Dr.Mohammed Abad Alrazak

9. "'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded."
Author: Friedrich August Von Hayek

10. "War always reaches the depths of horror because of idiots who perpetuate terror from generation to generation under the pretext of vengeance."
Author: Guy Sajer

11. "Narziss, I am guilty of having passed rash judgement on you. I had thought you proud, and perhaps I did you an injustice. You are much alone, brother; you have many to admire you, but no friends. I wished to find the pretext to chide you a little. But I find none. I wanted to see you as disobedient as young men of your age so easily are. But you never disobey. Sometimes Narziss, you make me uneasy."
Author: Hermann Hesse

12. "Hatred is the vice of narrow souls; they feed it with all their littleness, and make it the pretext of base tyrannies."
Author: Honoré De Balzac

13. "The Mexicans had fired the first shot. But they had done what the American government wanted, according to Colonel Hitchcock, who wrote in his diary, even before those first incidents: I have said from the first that the United States are the aggressors. . . . We have not one particle of right to be here. . . . It looks as if the government sent a small force on purpose to bring on a war, so as to have a pretext for taking California and as much of this country as it chooses, for, whatever becomes of this army, there is no doubt of a war between the United States and Mexico. . . . My heart is not in this business . . . but, as a military man, I am bound to execute orders."
Author: Howard Zinn

14. "A subject to which few intellectuals ever give a thought is the right to be a vagrant, the freedom to wander. Yet vagrancy is a deliverance, and life on the open road is the essence of freedom. To have the courage to smash the chains with which modern life has weighted us (under the pretext that it was offering us more liberty), then to take up the symbolic stick and bundle and get out."
Author: Isabelle Eberhardt

15. "What is more natural than that a solidity, a complicity, a bond should be established between Reader and Reader, thanks to the book? You can leave the bookshop content, you, a man who thought that the period where you could still expect something from life had ended. You are bearing with you two different expectations, and both promise days of pleasant hopes; the expectation contained in the book - of a reading experience you are impatient to resume - and the expectation contained in that telephone number - of hearing again the vibrations, a times treble and at times smoldering, of that voice, when it will answer your first phone call in a while, in fact tomorrow, with the fragile pretext of the book, to ask her if she likes it or not, to tell her how many pages you have read or not read, to suggest to her that you meet again..."
Author: Italo Calvino

16. "¿Qué son las nubes, si no un pretexto para el cielo?¿Qué es la vida, si no una huida de la muerte?"
Author: James Clavell

17. "The civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretext, infringed."
Author: James Madison

18. "On Good Friday last year the SS found some pretext to punish 60 priests with an hour on "the tree." That is the mildest camp punishment. They tie a man's hands together behind his back, palms facing out and fingers pointing backward. Then they turn his hands inwards, tie a chain around his wrists and hoist him up by it. His own wight twists his joints and pulls them apart...Several of the priest who were hung up last year never recovered and died. If you don't have a strong heart, you don't survive it. Many have a permanently crippled hand."
Author: Jean Bernard

19. "Antiwhite racism is developing in sections of our cities where individuals - some of whom have French nationality - contemptuously designate French people as gaulois on the pretext they don't share the same religion, color or origins."
Author: Jean Francois Cope

20. "Every man having been born free and master of himself, no one else may under any pretext whatever subject him without his consent. To assert that the son of a slave is born a slave is to assert that he is not born a man."
Author: Jean Jacques Rousseau

21. "As the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, — as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen — and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries."
Author: Joel Barlow

22. "If this phrase of the 'balance of power' is to be always an argument for war, the pretext for war will never be wanting, and peace can never be secure."
Author: John Bright

23. "Passar a vida saltando de um paquete para uma estrada de ferro, e de uma estrada de ferro para um paquete, sob pretexto de fazer a volta ao mundo em oitenta dias! Não. Toda esta ginástica cessará em Bombaim, nem duvide disso."
Author: Jules Verne

24. "She missed him the days when some pretext served to take him away from her, just as one misses the sun on a cloudy day without having thought much about the sun when it was shining."
Author: Kate Chopin

25. "It is wrong to try to avoid the struggle against imperialism under the pretext that independence and revolution are important, but that peace is still more precious."
Author: Kim Il Sung

26. "Once a decade, once every eight years, Donald Trump finds some pretext to say I suck and that I'm bad."
Author: Kurt Andersen

27. "So that is what my dream meant! Pashenka is what I ought tohave been but failed to be. I lived for men on the pretext ofliving for God, while she lived for God imagining that she livesfor men. Yes, one good deed--a cup of water given withoutthought of reward--is worth more than any benefit I imagined Iwas bestowing on people. But after all was there not some shareof sincere desire to serve God?' he asked himself, and the answerwas: 'Yes, there was, but it was all soiled and overgrown bydesire for human praise. Yes, there is no God for the man wholives, as I did, for human praise. I will now seek Him!"
Author: Leo Tolstoy

28. "If you wish at once to do nothing and be respectable nowadays, the best pretext is to be at work on some profound study."
Author: Leslie Stephen

29. "Where does it all begin? History has no beginnings, for everything that happens becomes the cause or pretext for what occurs afterwards, and this chain of cause and pretext stretches back to the Palaeolithic age, when the first Cain of one tribe murdered the first Abel of another. All war is fratricide, and there is therefore an infinite chain of blame that winds its circuitous route back and forth across the path and under the feet of every people and every nation, so that a people who are the victims of one time become the victimisers a generation later, and newly liberated nations resort immediately to the means of their former oppressors. The triple contagions of nationalism, utopianism and religious absolutism effervesce together into an acid that corrodes the moral metal of a race, and it shamelessly and even proudly performs deeds that it would deem vile if they were done by any other."
Author: Louis De Bernières

30. "Mi táctica es mirarte aprender como sos quererte como sosmi táctica es hablarte y escucharte construir con palabras un puente indestructiblemi táctica es quedarme en tu recuerdo no sé cómo ni sé con qué pretexto pero quedarme en vosmi táctica es ser franco y saber que sos franca y que no nos vendamos simulacros para que entre los dosno haya telón ni abismosmi estrategia es en cambio más profunda y más simple mi estrategia es que un día cualquiera no sé cómo ni sé con qué pretexto por fin me necesites"
Author: Mario Benedetti Táctica Y Estrategia

31. "It is peculiar to "ressentiment criticism" that it does not seriously desire that its demands be fulfilled. It does not want to cure the evil. The evil is merely the pretext for the criticism."
Author: Max Scheler

32. "O desejo de ordem é, ao mesmo tempo desejo de morte, porque a vida é perpétua violação da ordem. Ou, inversamente, o desejo de ordem é um pretexto virtuoso através do qual o ódio do homem pelo homem justifica as suas malfeitorias."
Author: Milan Kundera

33. "It was a curious game. This curiousness was evidenced, for example, in the fact that the young man, even though he himself was playing the unknown driver remarkably well, did not for a moment stop seeing his girl in the hitchhiker. And it was precisely this that was tormenting. He saw his girl seducing a strange man, and had the bitter privilege of being present, of seeing at close quarters how she looked and of hearing what she said when she was cheating on him (when she had cheated on him, when she would cheat on him). He had the paradoxical honor of being himself the pretext for her unfaithfulness.This was all the worse because he worshipped rather than loved her. It had always seemed to him that her inward nature was real only within the bounds of fidelity and purity, and that beyond these bounds she would cease to be herself, as water ceases to be water beyond the boiling point."
Author: Milan Kundera

34. "Variety made the Revolution. Liberty was just a pretext."
Author: Napoleon

35. "This was all an excuse, I think. I was doing fine. I had a 93 average and I was holding my head above water. I had good friends and a loving family. And because I needed to be the center of attention, because I needed something more, I ended up here, wallowing in myself, trying to convince everybody around me that I have some kind of. . . disease. I don't have any disease. I keep pacing. Depression isn't a disease. It's a pretext for being a prima donna. Everybody knows that. My friends know it; my principal knows it. The sweating has started again. I can feel the Cycling roaring up in my brain. I haven't done anything right. What have I done, made a bunch of little pictures? That doesn't count as anything. I'm finished. My principal just called me and I hung up on him and didn't call back. I'm finished. I'm expelled. I'm finished."
Author: Ned Vizzini

36. "I wondered--not for the first time--whether one was ever justified in neglecting the welfare of one's own family in order to fight for the welfare of others. Can there be anything more important than looking after one's aging mother? Is politics merely a pretext for shirking one's responsibilities, an excuse for not being able to provide in the way one wanted?"
Author: Nelson Mandela

37. "No se me importa un pito que las mujerestengan los senos como magnolias o como pasas de higo;un cutis de durazno o de papel de lija.Le doy una importancia igual a cero,al hecho de que amanezcan con un aliento afrodisíacoo con un aliento insecticida.Soy perfectamente capaz de sorportarlesuna nariz que sacaría el primer premioen una exposición de zanahorias;¡pero eso sí! -y en esto soy irreductible- no les perdono,bajo ningún pretexto, que no sepan volar.Si no saben volar ¡pierden el tiempo las que pretendan seducirme!"
Author: Oliverio Girondo

38. "Give up your attachment to comfortable ways of living - show yourself in the gymnasium (gymnos = 'naked'), prove that you are not indifferent to the difference between perfect and imperfect, demonstrate to us that achievement - excellence, arete, virtu - has not remained a foreign word to you, admit that you have motives for new endeavours! Above all: only grant the suspicion that sport is a pastime for the most stupid as much space as it deserves, do not misuse it as a pretext to drift further in your customary state of self-neglect, distrust the philistine in yourself who thinks you are just fine as you are! Hear the voice from the stone, do not resist the call to get in shape! Seize the chance to train with a god!"
Author: Peter Sloterdijk

39. "We excuse our sloth under the pretext of difficulty."
Author: Quintilian

40. "Think: the hero prolongs himself, even his fallingwas only a pretext for being, his latest rebirth."
Author: Rainer Maria Rilke

41. "He is no longer the pretext for a story: the story itself renders him homage. The works of Fantomas can neither be destroyed nor accept modifications. ...Fantomas requires more of others than of himself ... He is never completely invisible. His likeness can be seen through his face. ... Fantomas's science is more precious than the word. It is not possible to guess it - and no one can doubt its power."
Author: René Magritte

42. "They knew that to put God in the constitution was to put man out. They knew that the recognition of a Deity would be seized upon by fanatics and zealots as a pretext for destroying the liberty of thought. They knew the terrible history of the church too well to place in her keeping or in the keeping of her God the sacred rights of man. They intended that all should have the right to worship or not to worship that our laws should make no distinction on account of creed. They intended to found and frame a government for man and for man alone. They wished to preserve the individuality of all to prevent the few from governing the many and the many from persecuting and destroying the few."
Author: Robert G. Ingersoll

43. "If there is no sufficient reason for war, the war party will make war on one pretext, then invent another... after the war is on."
Author: Robert M. La Follette

44. "The museums and parks are graveyards above the ground- congealed memories of the past that act as a pretext for reality."
Author: Robert Smithson

45. "On war and conquest: in the realm of human affairs one also needs a pretext. it is important to give it the rank of a universal imperative or of a divine commandment. The range of choices is not great; either it is that we must defend ourselves, or that we have an obligation to help others, or that we are fulfilling heaven's will. the optimal pretext would link all three of the motives."
Author: Ryszard Kapuściński

46. "By one means or another, the swiftest method of rejection of the holy prophets has been to find a pretext, however false or absurd, to dismiss the man so that his message could also be dismissed."
Author: Spencer W. Kimball

47. "...a novel for me is a pretext, a way of starting up and sustaining a complicated and many layered inner exchange, a to-and-fro which I long ago discovered that I need in order to locate myself in the world. Reading...keeps the inner realm open, susceptible. Involvement in a book sets things going at a depth. If I cannot sink into some virtual 'other' place or triangulate my experience with that of another, I feel that my life is lacking the shadows and overtones and illusion of added dimension that imagination provides. It feels flat to me."
Author: Sven Birkerts

48. "If a little flower could speak, it seems to me that it would tell us quite simply all that God has done for it, without hiding any of its gifts. It would not, under the pretext of humility, say that it was not pretty, or that it had not a sweet scent, that the sun had withered its petals,or the storm bruised its stem, if it knew that such were not the case."
Author: Thérèse De Lisieux

49. "Often, the pretexts for starting a war are not real shortages of land, food or fuel, but rather perceptions - like fear, honor and perceived self-interest."
Author: Victor Davis Hanson

50. "He said to himself, that this child had a right to know life before renouncing it, that to deprive her in advance, and in some sort without consulting her, of all joys, under the pretext of saving her from all trials, to take advantage of her ignorance of her isolation, in order to make an artificial vocation germinate in her, was to rob a human creature of its nature and to lie to God."
Author: Victor Hugo

Pretext Quotes Pictures