Great Throughts Treasury

"Ostentation is the signal flag of hypocrisy. The charlatan is verbose and assumptive; the Pharisee is ostentatious, because he is a hypocrite. Pride is the master sin of the Devil; and the Devil is the father of lies." - Edwin Hubbell Chapin

"A great many people do many things that seem to be inspired more by a spirit of ostentation than by heartfelt kindness… Such a pose is nearer akin to hypocrisy than to generosity or moral goodness." -

"The experience of the ages that are past, the hopes of the ages that are yet to come, unite their voices in an appeal to us; they implore us to think more of the character of our people than of its vast numbers; to look upon our vast natural resources, not as tempters to ostentation and pride, but as a means to be converted, by the refining alchemy of education, into mental and spiritual treasures - and thus give to the world the example of a nation whose wisdom increases with prosperity, and whose virtues are equal to its power." - Horace Mann

"No wringing of the hands and knocking the breast, or wishing one’s self unborn; all which are but the ceremonies of sorrow, the pomp and ostentation of an effeminate grief, which speak not so much the greatness of the misery as the smallness of the mind." -

"Fashion is the abortive issue of vain ostentation and exclusive egotism: it is haughty, trifling, affected, servile, despotic, mean and ambitious, precise and fantastical, all in a breath - tied to no rule, and bound to conform to every whim of the moment." - William Hazlitt

"I have always taken as the standard of the mode of teaching and writing, not the abstract, particular, professional philosopher, but universal man, that I have regarded man as the criterion of truth, and not this or that founder of a system, and have from the first placed the highest excellence of the philosopher in this, that he abstains, both as a man and as an author, from the ostentation of philosophy, i.e., that he is a philosopher only in reality, not formally, that he is a quiet philosopher, not a loud and still less a brawling one." - Ludwig Feuerbach, fully Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach

"A great many people do many things that seem to be inspired more by a spirit of ostentation than by heartfelt kindness… Such a pose is nearer akin to hypocrisy than to generosity or moral goodness. " - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL

"Liberty trains for liberty. Responsibility is the first step in responsibility." - W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

"God himself has no right to be a tyrant." - William Godwin