If they wish to alleviate the sufferings of the exploited classes, let them live up to their pretensions, let them abandon the academy and go out there and work politically and economically and in a humanitarian spirit.
Harold Bloom

If you try to go beyond your interests just for the sake of pretensions or wealth, your art becomes less legitimate.
Vincent D'Onofrio

Nearly everywhere monarchs raised themselves further above the level of the greatest nobles and buttressed their new pretensions to respect and authority with cannons and taxation.
J. M. Roberts

Pornography is a satire on human pretensions.
Angela Carter

Pretensions to moral superiority are devastatingly destructive.
Mary Douglas

Stripped of ethical rationalizations and philosophical pretensions, a crime is anything that a group in power chooses to prohibit.
Freda Adler

The first, that their pretensions to this possession of an art properly so called in their art of speaking are entirely unfounded; and the second, that they are involved in a profound mistake in their confusion of the good with the pleasant.
Friedrich Schleiermacher

The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labour in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.
Frederic Raphael

They're innocent movies, and they're fun movies and there were no pretensions about 'em.
Alex Winter

To a superior race of being the pretensions of mankind to extraordinary sanctity and virtue must seem... ridiculous.
William Hazlitt

What encouragement the apostle holds out to us. O my friends, that we might leave all our pretensions, and come to the truth in our own hearts.
Elias Hicks