Definition of Pretense

Pretense Quotations

I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.
Thomas Jefferson

The name and pretense of virtue is as serviceable to self-interest as are real vices.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld

The pious pretense that evil does not exist only makes it vague, enormous and menacing.
Aleister Crowley

Political Freedom without economic equality is a pretense, a fraud, a lie; and the workers want no lying.
Mikhail Bakunin

It seems to me that socialists today can preserve their position in academic economics merely by the pretense that the differences are entirely moral questions about which science cannot decide.
Friedrich August von Hayek

Most of the confidence which I appear to feel, especially when influenced by noon wine, is only a pretense.
Tennessee Williams

It is not poverty so much as pretense that harasses a ruined man - the struggle between a proud mind and an empty purse - the keeping up of a hollow show that must soon come to an end.
Washington Irving

It would be futile to attempt to fit women into a masculine pattern of attitudes, skills and abilities and disastrous to force them to suppress their specifically female characteristics and abilities by keeping up the pretense that there are no differences between the sexes.
Arianna Huffington

Frankly - and believe me, I say this without any pretense - when I see the road I've taken, I have to say that thanks to good luck, because without good luck one can do nothing, I've come out pretty well.
James MacArthur

I didn't come from any kind of academic background, but I lived in a college town and I knew people who weren't without pretense. There was this idea in the town that if something was European it would be good.
Sarah Vowell