Leftism hides under an intellectual veneer, but underneath it is all emotion
The Peloponnesian War turns out to be no dry chronicle of abstract cause and effect. No, it is above all an intense, riveting, and timeless story of strong and weak men, of heroes and scoundrels and innocents too, all caught in the fateful circumstances of rebellion, plague, and war that always strip away the veneer of culture and show us for what we really are.
The gentleman is solid mahogany; the fashionable man is only veneer.
It's the spirit within, not the veneer without, that makes a man.
The destruction that barbarians leave behind has a grim fascination, doesn't it? We're reminded how thin is the veneer of civilization.
There is no short cut to achievement. Life requires thorough preparation - veneer isn't worth anything.
Wearing a veneer of perfection never did me any good.
It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.
Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it's this veneer - that the designers are handed this box and told, "Make it look good!" That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
The lyric abstrusities of Auden ring mystically down the circular canals of my ear and it begins to look like snow. The good gray conservative obliterating snow. Smoothing (in one white lacy euphemism after another) out all the black bleak angular unangelic nauseous ugliness of the blasted sterile world: dry buds, shrunken stone houses, dead vertical moving people all all all go under the great white beguiling wave. And come out transformed. Lose yourself in a numb dumb snow-daubed lattice of crystal and come out pure with the white virginal veneer you never had.
After all, we are not French and never can be, and any attempt to be so is to deny our inheritance and to try to impose upon ourselves a character that can be nothing but a veneer upon the surface.
[T]he normal and the everyday are often amazingly unstoppable, and what is unimaginable is the cessation of them. The world is resilient, and, no matter what interruptions occur, people so badly want to return to their lives and get on with them. A veneer of civilization descends quickly, like a shining rain. Dust is settled.
Arrogance is a veneer -- a thin covering of excuses hiding deep performance deficiencies.
Hope is tomorrow's veneer over today's disappointment.
Good design is not an applied veneer.
There's nothing more exciting for an actor than a chance to lose, to be someone who has lost - especially if it's someone who starts off with a veneer of control. To be broken is wonderful.
The scary truth is, you have to scratch some veneer off to gauge where the moral fiber really is in certain pockets of society. It's raw. It's scary. But it gives us a place to work with.
Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.
Well neither of us were "Buddhists" then because it was new to us. We were 60's people. Psychedelic relics, you know. . . whatever, right on, radicals and world changers, social peaceniks perhaps, with a Buddhist spiritual veneer.
Drop the veneer periodically and be like "OK, I'm an imperfect human. Let's try to get through this. "
