Pretexts Quotes & Sayings

A glass poured to air for the one who sits with us unseen; the patron and protector, the Crooked Warden, the Father of Necessary Pretexts.
Thanks for deep pockets poorly guarded.
Thanks for watchmen asleep at their posts.
Thanks for the city to nurture us and the night to hide us.
Thanks for friends to help us spend the loot. — Scott Lynch

He had come to us only three years earlier, but had already won general sympathy, mainly because he "knew how to bring society together." His house was never without guests, and it seemed he would have been unable to live without them. He had to have guests to dinner every day, even if only two, even if only one, but without guests he would not sit down to eat. He gave formal dinners, too, under all sorts of pretexts, sometimes even the most unexpected. The food he served, though not refined, was abundant, the cabbage pies were excellent, and the wines made up in quantity for what they lacked in quality. In the front room stood a billiard table, surrounded by quite decent furnishings; that is, there were even paintings of English racehorses in black frames on the walls, which, as everyone knows, constitute a necessary adornment of any billiard room in a bachelor's house. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Tyrants seldom want pretexts — Edmund Burke

He who has once begun to live by robbery will always find pretexts for seizing what belongs to others; — Niccolo Machiavelli

Faith's table is always laid, whether the invited guest sits down or stays away with a thousand excuses and pretexts. — Hans Urs Von Balthasar

SHORE-LARK
During the week, the shore-lark works in the City and flies home every night with its mate in Wimbledon, where it is a model husband and father. At weekends, however, it migrates briefly on Brighton, on any of one hundred pretexts, where is meets female shore-larks under the pier and seeks to recapture its lost youth. — Alan Coren

But it is meaningless to speak of short-range and long-range plans. There are plans that lead to action today - and they are true plans, true strategic decisions. And there are plans that talk about action tomorrow - they are dreams, if not pretexts for nonthinking, nonplanning, nondoing. The — Peter F. Drucker

What we believe to be the motives of our conduct are usually but the pretexts for it. — Miguel De Unamuno

Who is against democracy? Is it the one who calls for peaceful resistance, or the one who bombs people, sheds their blood and leads them away from the leaders under feeble and dirty pretexts? — Muqtada Al Sadr

I never made a mistake in my life; at least, never one that I couldn't explain away afterwards. — Rudyard Kipling

If something is right (or wrong) for us, it's right (or wrong) for others. It follows that if it's wrong for Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and a long list of others to bomb Washington and New York, then it's wrong for Rumsfeld to bomb Afghanistan (on much flimsier pretexts), and he should be brought before war crimes trials. — Noam Chomsky

I saw in the whole Christian world a license of fighting at which even barbarous nations might blush. Wars were begun on trifling pretexts or none at all, and carried on without any reference of law, Divine or human. — Hugo Grotius

In the end the war was Hitler's war. It was not perhaps the war he wanted. But it was the war he was prepared to risk if he had to. Nothing could deter him...He was no longer prepared to wait on events. He needed to force them to manipulate them to manufacture incidents to create pretexts for action. — Donald Cameron Watt

Well, you can try to rationalize it all you want, you can invent all kinds of noble-sounding pretexts, but in the end, a scam is a scam. — Haruki Murakami

It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed. Otherwise we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land ... The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing ... I feel the need for more precise concentration upon military objectives, such as oil and communications behind the immediate battle-zone, rather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive. — Winston Churchill

Pretexts are not wanting when one wishes to use them. — Carlo Goldoni

Managers at [the nuclear] sector should know that we need diplomacy and not slogans, .. This [is] where we should use all our leverages with patience and wisdom, without provocation and slogans that can give pretexts to the enemies. — Bill Vaughan

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. — Brennan Manning

History is nothing but a procession of false Absolutes, a series of temples raised to pretexts, a degradation of the mind before the Improbable. — Emile M. Cioran

In its attempt to crush the Black Panthers, the FBI engineered frequent arrests on the flimsiest of pretexts. — Alexander Cockburn

Youth does not require reasons for living, it only needs pretexts. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Temporary deviations from fundamental principles are always more or less dangerous. When the first pretext fails, those who become interested in prolonging the evil will rarely be at a loss for other pretexts. — James Madison

The love of truth, virtue, and the happiness of mankind are specious pretexts, but not the inward principles that set divines at work; else why should they affect to abuse human reason, to disparage natural religion, to traduce the philosophers as they universally do? — George Berkeley

Mine was a trained Presbyterian conscience and knew but the one duty - to hunt and harry its slave upon all pretexts and on all occasions, particularly when there was no sense nor reason in it. — Mark Twain

A month after the fall of the Berlin Wall the US invaded Panama, killing a couple of hundred or maybe a couple of thousand people, destroying poor neighborhoods, reinstating a regime of bankers and narcotraffickers - drug peddling and money laundering shot way up, as congressional research bureaus soon advised - and so on. That's normal, a footnote to history, but there were two differences: one difference is that the pretexts were different. This was the first intervention since the beginning of the Cold War that was not undertaken to defend ourselves from the Russians. This time, it was to defend ourselves from Hispanic narcotraffickers. Secondly, the US recognized right away that it was much freer to invade without any concern that somebody, the Russians, might react somewhere in the world, as former Undersecretary of State Abrams happily pointed out. — Noam Chomsky

History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetites, which shake the public with the same
- "troublous storms that toss
The private state, and render life unsweet."
These vices are the causes of those storms. Religion, morals, laws, prerogatives, privileges, liberties, rights of men, are the pretexts. — Edmund Burke

In itself, every idea is neutral, or should be; but man animates ideas, projects his flames and flaws into them; impure, transformed into beliefs, ideas take their place in time, take shape as events: the trajectory is complete, from logic to epilepsy ... whence the birth of ideologies, doctrines, deadly games.
Idolaters by instinct, we convert the objects of our dreams and our interests into the Unconditional. History is nothing but a procession of false Absolutes, a series of temples raised to pretexts, a degradation of the mind before the Improbable. Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create fake gods, he feverishly adopts them: his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike. — Emil Cioran

When an Israelite and a Gentile have a lawsuit before thee, if thou canst, acquit the former according to the laws of Israel, and tell the latter such is our law; if thou canst get him off in accordance with Gentile law, do so, and say to the plaintiff such is your law; but if he cannot be acquitted according to either law, then bring forward adroit pretexts and secure his acquittal. These are the words of Rabbi Ishmael. — Maurice H. Harris

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. — Victor Davis Hanson

Fraternity means that the father no longer sacrifices the sons; instead the brothers kill one another. Wars between nations have been replaced by civil war. The great settling of accounts, first under national 'pretexts,' led to a rapidly escalating world civil war. — Ernst Junger

Then also pretexts for seizing property are never wanting, and one who begins to live by rapine will always find some reason for taking the goods of others, whereas causes for taking life are rarer and more quickly destroyed. — Niccolo Machiavelli

Besides, the conflict is not really between royalty and democracy. It is between both and plutocracy, which, having destroyed the royal power by frank force under democratic pretexts, has bought and swallowed democracy. — Russell Kirk

For instinct dictates our duty and the intellect supplies us with pretexts for evading it. — Marcel Proust

Perhaps peace is not, after all, something you work for, or 'fight for.' It is indeed 'fighting for peace' that starts all the wars. What, after all, are the pretexts of all these Cold War crises, but 'fighting for peace?' Peace is something you have or do not have. If you are yourself at peace, then there is at least some peace in the world. Then share your peace with everyone, and everyone will be at peace. — Thomas Merton