“Pedantry is properly the over-rating of any kind of knowledge we pretend to.”
A Treatise on Good Manners and Good Breeding
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Jonathan Swift 141
Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet 1667–1745Related quotes

Anna Wulf, in "Free Women: 2"<!-- 255 -->
Source: The Golden Notebook (1962)
Context: It seems to me like this. It's not a terrible thing — I mean, it may be terrible, but it's not damaging, it's not poisoning, to do without something one really wants. It's not bad to say: My work is not what I really want, I'm capable of doing something bigger. Or I'm a person who needs love, and I'm doing without it. What's terrible is to pretend that the second-rate is the first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.

“English Aphorists,” p. 103
Reperusals and Recollections (1936)

King v. Burdett (1820), 1 St. Tr. (N. S.) 140.

“Failure to properly conceptualize the nature of knowledge assets condemns firms.”
Source: Knowledge Assets, 1998, p. 2

“The political career properly viewed is really a kind of Ministry.”
Speech at the Langham Hotel (11 February 1926), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), p. 197.
1926

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. xxvi
“Being unique is highly over rated.”
Source: Working Class Zero (2003), Chapter 29, p. 228

Source: 1980s–1990s, Knowledge and Decisions (1980; 1996), Ch. 1 : The Role of Knowledge