Ostensible Quotes & Sayings

At every Christmas, I fail to remember the daughters' shoe sizes, and they are not growing, but grown. After ostensible hard thought about who needs what, I have failed to give good gifts; I have failed to receive good gifts. — Padgett Powell

The purpose of democracy - supplanting old belief in the necessary absoluteness of establish'd dynastic rulership, temporal, ecclesiastical, and scholastic, as furnishing the only security against chaos, crime, and ignorance - is, through many transmigrations, and amid endless ridicules, arguments, and ostensible failures — Walt Whitman

Those skilled at making the enemy move do so by creating a situation to which he must conform; they entice him with something he is certain to take, and with lures of ostensible profit they await him in strength. — Sun Tzu

Journalists usually treat anything as true if someone in a position of ostensible authority is willing to say it, even anonymously (and if no one is going to sue over it). The accuracy of anyone's statement, particularly if that person is a public official, is often deemed irrelevant. If no evidence is available for an argument a journalist wishes to include in a story, then up pop weasel words such as "it seems" or "some claim" to enable inclusion of the argument, no matter how shaky its foundation in reality. What's more, too many journalists believe that their job description does not require them to adjudicate between competing claims of truth. Sure, there are "two sides" - and only two sides - to every story, according to the rules of objectivity. But if both sides wish to deploy lies and other forms of deliberate deception for their own purposes, well, that's somebody else's problem. — Eric Alterman

I do not assert that the ostensible end, or even that the secret aim, of American parties is to promote the rule of aristocracy or democracy in the country; but I affirm that aristocratic or democratic passions may easily be detected at the bottom of all parties, and that, although they escape a superficial observation, they are the main point and the very soul of every faction in the United States. — Alexis De Tocqueville

A certain degree of power must be granted to public officers, for they would be of no use without it. But the ostensible semblance of authority is by no means indispensable to the conduct of affairs, and it is needlessly offensive to the susceptibility of the public. — Alexis De Tocqueville

In no circumstance would the United States or any other nation have the right to mount a military invasion to overthrow another government for the ostensible purpose of achieving disarmament. Rather, the United States would respect the Charter of the UN and would strive to achieve disarmament and settle the differences among nations through peaceful diplomatic means. — David Cortright

a dramatic increase in the collective power and ostensible success of our species went hand in hand with much individual suffering. — Yuval Noah Harari

[N]o such thing as objective writing, ... every inscription, every traveler's tale, every news account, every piece of technical writing, tells more about the author and his time than it does about the ostensible subject. — Sue Hubbell

But this is what it means to be civilized - doing what her betters say she should, for the ostensible good of all. — N.K. Jemisin

Government relief tends constantly to get out of hand. And even when it is kept within reasonable bounds it tends to reduce the incentives to work and to save both of those who receive it and of those who are forced to pay it. It may be said, in fact, that practically every measure that governments take with the ostensible object of 'helping the poor' has the long-run effect of doing the opposite. — Henry Hazlitt

I'm just attracted to playing people who are ostensible unlikable. That's not to say that there's something in there that makes you care. It might be that you just find them so awful that you just can't stop watching, like a car crash. — Steve Coogan

On the ostensible exactitude of certain branches of human knowledge, including mathematics. The exactness is a fake. — Alfred North Whitehead

Certain corpuscles, denominated Christmas Books, with the ostensible intention of swelling the tide of exhilaration, or other expansive emotions, incident upon the exodus of the old and the inauguration of the New Year. — William Makepeace Thackeray

My definition of a good book is one that you would read for pleasure despite having no prior interest in the subject. The ostensible subject may be whale hunting, or survival in Auschwitz, or waking up as a cockroach - but you don't read it because you're into fisheries or Nazis or entomology: you read it because your life was poorer before you started it, and because now you can't stop. — Philip Gourevitch

The Augustus of history and panegyric stands aloof and alone, with all the power and all the glory. But he did not win power and hold it by his own efforts alone: was the ostensible author and prime agent in the policy of regeneration merely perhaps carrying out the instructions of a concealed oligarchy or the general mandate of his adherents? — Ronald Syme

We are one people despite the ostensible rifts, cracks, and differences between the American and Soviet democracies. We are one people and it is not in our interests that the West should liberate the East, for in doing this and in liberating the enslaved nations, the West would inevitably deprive Jewry of the Eastern half of its world power. — Chaim Weizmann

Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion. — Emile M. Cioran

God receives none but those who are forsaken, restores health to none but those who are sick, gives sight to none but the blind, and life to none but the dead. He does not give saintliness to any but sinners, nor wisdom to any but fools. In short: He has mercy on none but the wretched and gives grace to none but those who are in disgrace. Therefore no arrogant saint, or just or wise man can be material for God, neither can he do the work of God, but he remains confined within his own work and makes of himself a fictitious, ostensible, false, and deceitful saint, that is, a hypocrite — Martin Luther

My argument for them is not altruistic in the least, but purely selfish. I should dislike to see them harassed by the law for two plain and sound reasons. One is that their continued existence soothes my vanity (and hence promotes my happiness) by proving to me that there are even worse fools in the world than I am. The other is that, if they were jailed to-morrow for believing in Christian Science, I should probably be jailed the next day for refusing to believe in something still sillier. Once the law begins to horn into such matters, I am against the law, no matter how virtuous its ostensible intent. No liberty is worth a hoot which doesn't allow the citizen to be foolish once in a while, and to kick up once in a while, and to hurt himself once in a while. — H.L. Mencken

The advertising industry is one of our most basic forms of communication and, allegedly, of information. Yet, obviously, much of this ostensible information is not purveyed to inform but to manipulate and to achieve a result - to make somebody think he needs something that very possibly he doesn't need, or to make him think one version of something is better than another version when the ground for such a belief really doesn't exist. — Marvin E. Frankel

Epigram, than which, if one is content with ostensible — F Scott Fitzgerald

A media system wants ostensible diversity that conceals an actual uniformity — Joseph Goebbels

The political movements, or ideologies, inspired by Hegel are all united in
the ostensible abandonment of virtue. — Albert Camus

But this graveyard of dead books doesn't unnerve me. It reminds me that I had a deeper motive, one that only the approach of old age and death has unlocked. I wrote to answer questions I had - the motive of all art, whatever its ostensible subject. There were things I urgently needed to know. — James Atlas

But it would have been a surprise, not only to katherine herself, if some magic watch could have taken count of the moments spent in an entirely different occupation from her ostensible one.Sitting with faded papers before her, she took part in a series of scenes such as the taming of wild ponies upon the American prairies, or the conduct of a vast ship in a hurricane round a black promontory of rock, or in others more peaceful, but marked by her complete emancipation from her present surroundings and, needles to say, her surprising ability in her new vocation. — Virginia Woolf

Generally speaking, a web of great mystification has been woven around time. Above all, the mystification about the ostensible objectivity of time. Utter nonsense. Time is a completely subjective matter, but every person is not a subject, and that is the problem. Timepieces are perhaps exact, but time is not, time is a matter of personality, or even of affinity. — Svetislav Basara

The fear of speculation, the ostensible rush from the theoretical to the practical, brings about the same shallowness in action that it does in knowledge. It is by studying a strictly theoretical philosophy that we become most acquainted with Ideas, and only Ideas provide action with energy and ethical significance. — Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

Often the narcissist believes that other people are "faking it", leveraging emotional displays to achieve a goal. He is convinced that their ostensible "feelings" are grounded in ulterior, non-emotional motives. Faced with other people's genuine emotions, the narcissist becomes suspicious and embarrassed. He feels compelled to avoid emotion-tinged situations, or worse, experiences surges of almost uncontrollable aggression in the presence of expressed sentiments. They remind him how imperfect he is and how poorly equipped. — Sam Vaknin

In ressentiment morality, love for the "small," the "poor," the "weak," and the "oppressed" is really disguised hatred, repressed envy, an impulse to detract, etc., directed against the opposite phenomena: "wealth," "strength," "power," "largesse." When hatred does not dare to come out into the open, it can be easily expressed in the form of ostensible love - love for something which has features that are the opposite of those of the hated object. This can happen in such a way that the hatred remains secret. When we hear that falsely pious, unctuous tone (it is the tone of a certain "socially-minded" type of priest), sermonizing that love for the "small" is our first duty, love for the "humble" inspirit, since God gives "grace" to them, then it is often only hatred posing as Christian love. — Max Scheler

When romances do really teach anything, or produce any effective operation, it is usually through a far more subtle process than the ostensible one. The author has considered it hardly worth his while, therefore, relentlessly to impale the story with its moral as with an iron rod-or, rather, as by sticking a pin through a butterfly-thus at once depriving it of life, and causing it to stiffen in an ungainly and unnatural attitude. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of today. — Theodore Roosevelt

If capitalist realism is so seamless, and if current forms of resistance are so hopeless and impotent, where can an effective challenge come from? A moral critique of capitalism, emphasizing the ways in which it leads to suffering, only reinforces capitalist realism. Poverty, famine and war can be presented as an inevitable part of reality, while the hope that these forms of suffering could be eliminated easily painted as naive utopianism. Capitalist realism can only be threatened if it is shown to be in some way inconsistent or untenable; if, that is to say, capitalism's ostensible 'realism' turns out to be nothing of the sort. — Mark Fisher

I have observed, through many years of living in north Brooklyn, that people, for example an ostensible group of friends, can be dangerous to one another. — Kate Christensen

The underlying questions of appetite, after all, are formidable - What would satisfy? How much do you need, and of what? What are the true passions, the real hungers behind the ostensible goals of beauty or slenderness? — Caroline Knapp

In reality the workings of your governing system are opaque and covert, while hiding in the chattering spotlight of an ostensible transparency, even though the ultimate objective is clear. — Breyten Breytenbach

(This is how the iron law of bureaucracy installs itself at the heart of an institution. Most of the activities of any bureaucracy are devoted not to the organization's ostensible goals, but to ensuring that the organization survives: because if they aren't, the bureaucracy has a life expectancy measured in days before some idiot decision maker decides that if it's no use to them they can make political hay by destroying it. It's no consolation that some time later someone will realize that an organization was needed to carry out the original organization's task, so a replacement is created: you still lost your job and the task went undone. The only sure way forward is to build an agency that looks to its own survival before it looks to its mission statement. Just another example of evolution in action.) — Charles Stross

He looks as if he were three or four; looks just like one of those unapproachable, incomprehensible, willful little prehuman creatures, who in their ostensible innocence think only of themselves, who want to subordinate the whole world to their despotic will, and would do it, too, if one let them pursue their megalomaniacal ways and did not apply the strictest pedagogical principles to guide them to a disciplined, self-controlled, fully human existence. — Patrick Suskind

That taxes may be the ostensible cause is true, but that they are the true cause is as far remote from truth as light from darkness. — Henry Knox

I am closer to who I want to be when I am alone lately. With people, I hear my voice and I just wonder who or what I'm doing all this for. Spreading myself out in front of people. Devaluing my ostensible worth by being so readily available to almost any random pedestrian who wanders into the crosswalk of my focus. If someone is within an earshot I shoot off at the mouth. — Carrie Fisher

Don't you sometimes wish that you had been born into the Age of Reason, instead of into the Age of the Ostensible Reason? — John Wyndham