Pander Quotes & Sayings

That which attracts the world must please and pander to the self-importance of man. The world itself is a vain show, and likes its own. Consequently there is nothing which so carries the mass of men along with it as that which flatters the vanity of the human mind. It may assume the lowliest air, but sinful man seeks his own honour and present exaltation. — William Kelly

Lemat's agent says to him: y duty to you, first and foremost, is make sure you have a career, a prosperous one. I know authors always want to pander to their more artistic leanings, but this is a business after all. You have to do something to pay the bills so you can keep on writing. If you wanted to be an author just for the sake of expressing your thoughts, you could have done that by staying self-published, am I correct? but that's not what you wanted. That's not why you penned Killing Jesus. You wanted to get out there and swim in a bigger pond, didn't you? Well, here you are. Welcome to the blooming ocean. — Henry Mosquera

Tell the truth boldly, whether it hurts or not. Never pander to weakness. If truth is too much for intelligent people and sweeps them away, let them go; the sooner the better. — Swami Vivekananda

His failure to adapt to new techniques, to pander (his own word), probably made his supporters love him all the more, and probably also narrowed his political base. — David Halberstam

The more you pander to what is, presumably, the taste of young people, the more you corrupt. — Ruth Rendell

It began when I was so ill that there was a good chance of dying. I promised myself that if I survived I would never again pander to a magazine's requests or follow the ideas of art directors. I would only make images which were personal, which arose out of my own life. — Helmut Newton

It is a love/hate relationship I have with the human race. I am an elitist, and I feel that my responsibility is to drag the human race along with me, that I will never pander to, or speak down to, or play the safe game. — Harlan Ellison

I don't want to be pandered to, so I try not to pander. — Aisha Tyler

Most comedies are calculated. They tend to pander. They're not about anything important. — Harold Ramis

Teachers who pander to minority students by turning their courses into rap sessions and ethnic navel-gazing exercises capture their interest and allegiance. — Thomas Sowell

Spoke of the professional men and the artists as villeins. What else are they? One and all, the professors, the preachers, and the editors, hold their jobs by serving the Plutocracy, and their service consists of propagating only such ideas as are either harmless to or commendatory of the Plutocracy. Whenever they propagate ideas that menace the Plutocracy, they lose their jobs, in which case, if they have not provided for the rainy day, they descend into the proletariat and either perish or become working-class agitators. And don't forget that it is the press, the pulpit, and the university that mould public opinion, set the thought-pace of the nation. As for the artists, they merely pander to the little less than ignoble tastes of the Plutocracy. But — Jack London

Our dreams disturb us because they refuse to pander to our fondest notions of ourselves. The closer one looks, the more they seem to insist upon a challenging proposition: You must live truthfully. Right now. And always. Few forces in life present, with an equal sense of inevitability, the bare-knuckle facts of who we are, and the demands of what we might become. — Marc Ian Barasch

Fleeing persecution is not a crime. And we do not seek to pander to a noisy, tiny minority who will never embrace modern multicultural Australia. But there are important truths we must face. There is a history and a reality that we cannot ignore. The challenge before us is real, the questions we grapple with as elemental as life and death. — Bill Shorten

It's a film made in a very radical creative manner. It was possible because we didn't have to pander to capitalism. I think the film is also a humanistic cry for help for animation. It's a film [Boy and the World] with sensitivities completely opposite to what the market wants to sell. — Alex Abreu

Politicians will pander to special-interest groups eager to gain at the public expense. — Donald J. Boudreaux

The sin which is unpardonable is knowingly and wilfully to reject truth, to fear knowledge lest that knowledge pander not to thy prejudices. — Aleister Crowley

The Night is young & full of rest I can't describe the way she's dress'd She'll pander to some strange requests Anything that you suggest Anything to please her guest. — Jim Morrison

So always avoid banality. That is, avoid illustrating the author's words and remarks. If you want to create a true masterpiece you must always avoid beautiful lies: the truths on the calender under each date you find a proverb or saying such as: "He who is good to others will be happy." But this is not true. It is a lie. The spectator, perhaps, is content. The spectator likes easy truths. But we are not there to please or pander to the spectator. We are here to tell the truth. — Jerzy Grotowski

A journal should be neither an echo nor a pander. — George William Curtis

You can't pander to your audience. You might in the short term, but ultimately you can't hoodwink them, either. — Peter Maxwell Davies

If you want to be a thought leader, market leader, or change the world - you have to give up the need to be liked. Telling people what they want to hear makes you popular. Telling people what they need to hear makes you relevant, empowering, and significant.

Don't pander to the masses. Speak to the people you really want to reach and be honest. Challenge them to do more and become better. And know that if you're not attracting some haters - you're probably not doing something significant. — Randy Gage

Polls consistently show that the majority of Americans favour research using embryonic stem cells and yet politicians continue to pander to the outspoken religious minority that is hampering efforts to develop this potentially valuable technology. — James D. Watson

Artists make art for themselves. Art is an honest expression. Artists who pander to their fans by trying to make music "for" their fans make empty, transparent art. The true fan does not want you to make music for them, they want you to make music for you, because that's the whole reason they fell in love with you in the first place ... — Talib Kweli

Yet I have a clever touch and pander to your vices. While looking on in exultation. And so I play my game, with the exuberance of experience, the strange and terribly subtle final aims of my Asiatic Blood that remain a mystery to you. — Paul Meyer

There are a lot of lousy conferences that pander to sponsors. They end up creating an opportunity for boring speakers who are paid shills for their companies. We still get a few of those, but we really try to police it. Think about who the audience is and what works for them, and deliver high-quality content. — Tim O'Reilly

The surpluses will have to be expended somehow, and trust the oligarchs to find a way. Magnificent roads will be built. There will be great achievements in science, and especially in art. When the oligarchs have completely mastered the people, they will have time to spare for other things. They will become worshippers of beauty. They will become art-lovers. And under their direction and generously rewarded, will toil the artists. The result will be great art; for no longer, as up to yesterday, will the artists pander to the bourgeois taste of the middle class. It will be great art, I tell you, and wonder cities will arise that will make tawdry and cheap the cities of old time. And in these cities will the oligarchs dwell and worship beauty — Jack London

If you constantly pander to the wishes of others, you will never accomplish anything. — Gary Oldman

A good portrait is incredibly hard to create, there is too much temptation to pander to the individual rather than portray them as they really were — Philippe Halsman

Creators understand that their emotions are not necessarily a sign of the circumstances. They understand that in desperate circumstances they may experience joy, and in jubilant circumstances they may feel regret. They know that any emotion will change. But because emotions are not the centerpiece of their lives, they do not pander to them. They create what they create, not in reaction to their emotions but independent of them. On days filled with the depths of despair, they can create. On days filled with the heights of joy, they can create. — Robert Fritz

Democrats have chosen not to defend the Marine Corps, but to pander to anti-war protesters and Berkeley officials that are actively trying to impede military recruitment. — Jim DeMint

You teach the reader that he's way smarter than he thought he was. I think one of the insidious lessons about TV is the meta-lesson that you're dumb. This is all you can do. This is easy, and you're the sort of person who really just wants to sit in a chair and have it easy. When in fact there are parts of us, in a way, that are a lot more ambitious than that. And what we need ... is seriously engaged art that can teach again that we're smart. And that's the stuff that TV and movies - although they're great at certain things - cannot give us. But that have to create the motivations for us to want to do the extra work, to get those other kinds of art ... Which is tricky, because you want to seduce the reader, but you don't want to pander or manipulate them. I mean, a good book teaches the reader how to read it. — David Foster Wallace

You also ought to know that mandrake is a powerful aphrodisiac and is used in love magic, particularly to break down female resistance. That's the explanation of mandrake's folk name: love apple. It's a herb used to pander lovers.' 'Blockhead,' Milva commented. 'And — Andrzej Sapkowski

University lectures are an obsolete practice inherited from the Middle Ages when books were scarce. Students should read, not listen. To swallow instruction from a lectern is like sipping through a straw. Lectures pander to the vanity of the lecturer and stimulate conflict between academics. — Virginia Woolf

An unvirtuous citizenry tend to elect representatives who will pander to their covetous lustings. — Ezra Taft Benson

What religion has always done is pander to biases, achieving success not by challenging people with something new but by reinforcing what they already believe, no matter how wrong it is. By contrast, science shines by breaking the shackles of our preconceptions and letting us work with what really is. The — P.Z. Myers

I have no trouble selling out - I'm a benevolent hack, in a certain way - but I want to pander for something I believe in. — Harold Ramis

Obliging elected Democrats willingly pander to the radical lefties who elevated them to their throne. — Bob Beauprez

I hate politics. It's slimy. Any job where people pander for votes, I don't like. The country has gotten so partisan that if you're not on my side, you're the enemy. The only thing I ever try to support is a third party, like Unity08. We need more parties and more choice. — Mark Cuban

Sick I am of idle words, past all reconciling, Words that weary and perplex and pander and conceal, Wake the sounds that cannot lie, for all their sweet beguiling; The language one need fathom not, but only hear and feel. — George Du Maurier

It is nothing new when young people want churches to pander to them. What is new is the extent to which churches have obliged. — Michael S. Horton

Every minute you are thinking of evil, you might have been thinking of good instead. Refuse to pander to a morbid interest in your own misdeeds.
Pick yourself up, be sorry, shake yourself, and go on again. — Evelyn Underhill

Most writers cannot afford focus groups or A/B testing, but they can ask a roommate or colleague or family member to read what they wrote and comment on it. Your reviewers needn't even be a representative sample of your intended audience. Often it's enough that they are not you. This does not mean you should implement every last suggestion they offer. Each commentator has a curse of knowledge of his own, together with hobbyhorses, blind spots, and axes to grind, and the writer cannot pander to all of them. Many academic articles contain bewildering non sequiturs and digressions that the authors stuck in at the insistence of an anonymous reviewer who had the power to reject it from the journal if they didn't comply. Good prose is never written by a committee. A writer should revise in response to a comment when it comes from more than one reader or when it makes sense to the writer herself. — Steven Pinker

Consequently, citizen legislators, rotating back to their communities after a short period of public service - considered an indispensable and routine characteristic and design of representative government at the time of the founding, and for a century thereafter - have been replaced with a professional ruling class led by governing masterminds. For the most part, they are isolated from the communities from which they hail and are consumed with the daily jockeying for position and power within their ranks. Moreover, they both pander to and lord over their constituents. — Mark R. Levin

Jail is more commonly-suited to those less-commonly able to finance a defense (or to potentially pander the prosecution). The choices for council is either a retained lawyer or, by default, a public defender. In the later of these two, the common title in jail was 'public pretender'. — H. Kirk Rainer

Like I always tell people, I don't pander to any audience, but you have to play to your audience. — Gary Owens

[...] as with all vices, vast and lucrative industries are ready to supply the necessary material. It sometimes seems as if most of the news consists of outrage porn, selected specifically to pander to our impulse to judge and punish, to get us off on righteous indignation. — Tim Kreider

The advertiser is the overrewarded court jester and court pander at the democratic court. — Joseph Wood Krutch

Do not pander, patronize, scheme, or strategize," his instincts told him. "Simply go about your business in your usual professional manner." "But — Irvin D. Yalom

You never make all things for all people and can't always pander to the broadest denominator. I keep an eye toward doing the themes that interest me. Do they move me? Interest me? Make me think? When I run across something that is provocative in an unsettling way, it appeals to me. — Edward Norton

Values and verdicts never bother me half as much as people trying to weasel their way around them, or people compromising their reason to pander to their own prejudices and preconceptions, which they are so rarely competent to look in the face. — Kenny Smith

Stories that pander to your every readerly desire and whim are like overly loyal dogs that live for the simple glow of your approval. I'm a cat person. I like a little aloofness in my pets and my writing. — Alden Bell

In a land where sport is sacred, Where the labourer is God, You must pander to the people, Make a hero of a clod. — Henry Lawson

Few people read coffee-table photo books, and indeed they are not intended to be read. I find the text in these books is often surprisingly good, perhaps because the author
or more importantly, the editor
feels no need to pander. — Tyler Cowen

I've attended many concerts where I felt let down and I was wishing it would be something else. Not that it's their duty to please me, but at the same time, I think a lot about what it's like through the eyes of the consumer, the fan. I want not to pander to the audience, but to be aware of them. — Trent Reznor

I'm not doing it to pander to people. I just always knew what I liked versus what I don't like. I never liked things with too many zippers or spikes and stuff. That weirds me out. I like things that are pretty. And I think it's great to be pretty. I like being feminine. I think it's good to be feminine. We don't need to look like men or dress like men or talk like men to be powerful. We can be powerful in our own way, our own feminine way. — Zooey Deschanel

You must remember, too," he added, "that we deal with no ordinary criminal, but with the second greatest brain in the world." I forbore to pander to his conceit by asking the obvious question. — Agatha Christie

When I put on makeup, I'm not doing it to pander to antiquated patriarchal ideas of feminine beauty. I'm doing it because it makes me feel good. — Sophia Amoruso

I think the record-buying public know what they like, and when people are trying to pander to them, I think they know it. They want the genuine article, so if we try to sort of "dumb down" for the mass public, I think they're too smart for that, and would recognize us as fakes. It seems like the bands that do crossover do so really on their own terms, and they just find that their terms just kind of make a big dove-tail with the masses. — Ira Kaplan

That most embarrassing of statistical fictions, the commercial reader (not you, of course; not me), who presumably consumes texts only for story, is assumed to stand deaf to style, and is thought to applaud only the endlessly repeated pornographies of action and passion that, for all their violences, still manage to pander to an astonishingly untroubled acceptance of the personal and political status quo. — Samuel R. Delany

By treating patients like customers, as nurse Amy Bozeman pointed out in a Scrubs magazine article, hospitals succumb to the ingrained cultural notion that the customer is always right. "Now we are told as nurses that our patients are customers, and that we need to provide excellent service so they will maintain loyalty to our hospitals," Bozeman wrote. "The patient is NOT always right. They just don't have the knowledge and training." Some hospitals have hired "customer service representatives," but empowering these nonmedical employees to pander to patients' whims can backfire. Comfort is not always the same thing as healthcare. As Bozeman suggested, when representatives give warm blankets to feverish patients or complimentary milk shakes to patients who are not supposed to eat, and nurses take them away, patients are not going to give high marks to the nurses. — Alexandra Robbins

The fairest state of them all, this tranquil and beloved domain - what has it now become? A nursery for Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas. A monstrous breeding farm to supply the sinew to gratify the maw of Eli Whitney's infernal machine, cursed be that blackguard's name! In such a way is our human decency brought down, when we pander all that is in us noble and just to the false god which goes by the vile name of Capital! Oh, Virginia, woe betide thee! Woe, thrice woe, and ever damned in memory be the day when poor black men in chains first trod upon thy sacred strand! — William Styron

Instead of asking what's wrong with rampant consumerism, we ought to be asking, 'What justifies it?' Popular art does not have to pander to the lowest level of intelligence and taste. — Bill Watterson

At 'GQ,' there was never a temptation to pander or preach to the choir because I had no concept of who the reader was or what that reader might want. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

I never try to pander to an audience, and I'm really not concerned with my image. I'm far more interested in stretching my abilities as an actor. — Tom Selleck