“Tyrants seldom want pretexts.”
Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman
Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791)
A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791)
“Pretexts are not wanting when one wishes to use them.”
Non mancano pretesti quando si vuole.
La Villeggiatura (1761), I, 12.
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Carlo Goldoni9
Italian playwright and librettist 1707–1794Related quotes
“Dawn comes early when you wish it would not. The hours flash when you want them to drag.”
Glen Cook book The White Rose
Source: The White Rose (1985), Chapter 56, “Time Fading” (p. 686)
Leslie Stephen (1832–1904) British author, literary critic, and first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography
Sketches from Cambridge http://books.google.com/books?id=mjA4AAAAMAAJ&q=%22If+you+wish+at+once+to+do+nothing+and+to+be+respectable+now-a-days+the+best+pretext+is+to+be+at%22+%22work+on+some+profound+study%22&pg=PA5#v=onepage (1865)
Denis Diderot (1713–1784) French Enlightenment philosopher and encyclopædist
Observations on the Drawing Up of Laws (1774)
Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi (1960) Iranian politician
As quoted in Iran key player in Mideast, PressTV, 05 June 2007 https://web.archive.org/web/20081208034337/http://www.presstv.ir/Detail.aspx?id=12153&sectionid=351020101,
Jean Paul (1763–1825) German novelist
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 556.
“That's an amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one of them?”
Rutherford B. Hayes (1822–1893) American politician, 19th President of the United States (in office from 1877 to 1881)
Reportedly to Alexander Graham Bell after a demonstration of the telephone, as quoted in Future Mind : The Microcomputer-New Medium, New Mental Environment (1982) by Edward J. Lias, p. 2 but author did not footnote or in any other way cite a source for the quotation, and the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center has found no primary-source evidence that Rutherford B. Hayes made the comment. The same article erroneously states that President Hayes had his first experience with the telephone in 1876 in a "trial conversation between Washington and Philadephia." Rutherford B. Hayes was president of the United States in the years 1877-1881. His well documented experience with the telephone occurred in 1877 while Hayes was in Rhode Island. Prior to becomng disputed here, this statement was treated as probably spurious in "Obama’s whopper about Rutherford B. Hayes and the telephone" in the Washington Post (16 March 2012) http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/obamas-whopper-about-rutherford-b-hayes-and-the-telephone/2012/03/15/gIQAel6SFS_blog.html?wprss=fact-checker, which asserts Hayes installed a phone only months later, and that the Providence Journal (29 June 1877) reported his words during the demonstration as "That is wonderful!" <br class="br">Disputed
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist