Illusory Promise Quotes & Sayings

I don't have a particular recommendation other than that we base decisions on as much hard data as possible. We need to carefully look at all the options and all their ramifications in making our decisions. — Dorothy Denning

Don't answer the door in a wedding dress and veil, he might not think you're joking. — Amy Sedaris

The promise was void, like so many other sweet, illusory promises of our childhood; void as promises made in Eden before the seasons were divided, and when the starry blossoms grew side by side with the ripening peach, - impossible to be fulfilled when the golden gates had been passed. — George Eliot

People are not the way they are primarily in order to annoy me. — Mason Cooley

It was creative, not financial success that thrilled Walt. — Leslie Le Mon

A man can't live alone forever and when a woman comes along who accepts him, his faults and demons, maybe it's time he reevaluates his future. — Airicka Phoenix

The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises. The promissory note which, with its plots and staging, it draws on pleasure is endlessly prolonged; the promise, which is actually all the spectacle consists of, is illusory: all it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu. — Theodor W. Adorno

Like the medieval heretics that Norm Cohn wrote about in The Pursuit of the Millennium, the Beats cultivated an extreme narcissism that bordered on self-deification and that 'liberated them from all restraints' and allowed them to experience every impulse as a 'divine command'. What Norman Podhoretz observed of Ginsberg was also true of the Beats generally: they 'conjured up a world of complete freedom from the limits imposed by [bourgeois] responsibilities'. Podhoretz added, 'It was a world that promised endless erotic possibility together with the excitements of an expanded consciousness constantly open to new dimensions of being: more adventure, more sex, more intensity, more life'. Alas, the promise was illusory. Instead of an 'expanded consciousness', the Beats purchased madness, ruination, and, for many, an early death. Their attack on bourgeois responsibility led not to greater freedom but to greater chaos. The erotic paradise they envisioned turned out to be rife with misery. — Roger Kimball

With a room of his own, a room at the top, he could proffer a temporary refuge to some lovely, fatigued, world-weary, sophisticated, black-turtlenecked, heavily-eyelinered girl he might lure up the stairs into his newspaper-strewn boudoir and onto his Indian-bedspreaded bed with the promise of artistic talk about the craft of writing, and the throes and torments of creation, and the need for integrity, and the temptations of selling out, and the nobility of resisting such temptations, and so forth. A promise offered with a hint of self-mockery in case such a girl might think he was pompous and cocksure and full of himself. Which he was, because at that age you have to be that way in order to crawl out of bed in the morning and sustain your faith in your own illusory potential for the next twelve hours of being awake. — Margaret Atwood

A large fraction of the most interesting scientists have read a lot of SF at one time or another, either early enough that it may have played a part in their becoming scientists or at some later date just because they liked the ideas. — Frederik Pohl

A case could be made, in fact, that the English were the first victims of the British empire: without their conquest, that empire could not have been built. — Paul Kingsnorth

What others think does not matter. What you think about you is what matters. — Debasish Mridha

Nothing?" Favonius cried. "The one you care for most ... plunged into Tartarus, and you still will not allow the truth?"
Suddenly Jason felt like he was eavedropping.
The one you care for most. — Rick Riordan

In some cases - most notably the Christian - one revelation is apparently not sufficient, and needs to be reinforced by successive apparitions, with the promise of a further but ultimate one to come. In other cases, the opposite difficulty occurs and the divine instruction is delivered, only once, and for the final time, to an obscure personage whose lightest word then becomes law. Since all of these revelations, many of them hopelessly inconsistent, cannot by definition be simultaneously true, it must follow that some of them are false and illusory. It could also follow that only one of them is authentic, but in the first place this seems dubious and in the second place it appears to necessitate religious war in order to decide whose revelation is the true one. — Christopher Hitchens