Top 91 Veneer Quotes & Sayings

The purpose of satire has been rightly stated as to strip off the veneer of comforting illusion and cosy half truth, and our job, as I see it, is to put it back again!

I like extreme situations: people pushed out of their comfort zones; the civil veneer stripped off.

Wearing a veneer of perfection never did me any good.

Success is a very fragile veneer. I get wary of people who embrace celebrity. It ruins people.

I think there is this steely strength beneath this beautiful veneer that a lot of women possess. I can't fathom or understand it.

Good design is not an applied veneer.

What happened with Hurricane Katrina was the American electorate was forced to look at what lay behind the veneer of chest-beating. We all saw the consequences of having terrible government leadership.

I like to show subjects inside a sealed veneer. There's a sense that you can't get in.

In 2007, Lindsay Lohan seemed to be on top of the world, a bona fide star who had her pick of acting gigs. But it wasn't long before the veneer cracked, and Lindsay's life began to shatter.

What passes for education, culture or maturity in most minds is merely how individuals want to think of themselves, a contrived egocentric self-concept, not actual and effective principles and values. This is what is known in the cliche as the "veneer" of civilization.

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.

Racism has always been able to come up with a scientific veneer.

The queers of the sixties, like those since, have connived with their repression under a veneer of respectability. Good mannered city queens in suits and pinstripes, so busy establishing themselves, were useless at changing anything.

We don't have a good language to talk about this kind of thing. In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer... But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation.

Only when the true ends of society have nothing to do with the sublime does "culture" become necessary as a veneer to cover over the void. Culture can at best appreciate the monuments of earlier faith; it cannot produce them.

Only as a child is one truly innocent. When he grows, he must pull on one veneer after another.

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.

I love the nooks and crannies of the American landscape; the back roads and back alleys, the places that are still untouched by the corporate gloss, the veneer of sameness that seems to be spreading across the country.

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.

I think I've proven that I'm issue-oriented and I'm not apolitical. But I'm not a journalist and I don't want to be one with that veneer exterior.

Since the days of Peter the Great, Russians have been maybe Europeans who didn't share in the enlightenment and the reformation, or are they Mongol Asians with the European veneer. And they've gone back and forth.

Therefore, teaching, talk and tale, however lucid or fascinating, effect nothing until self-activity be set up; that is, self-education is the only possible education; the rest is mere veneer laid on the surface of a child's nature.

The gentleman is solid mahogany; the fashionable man is only veneer.

It's the spirit within, not the veneer without, that makes a man.

We veneer civilization by doing unkind things in a kind way.

But you know, eventually that does kind of veneer, chemical veneers that you apply, they sink in. For better or for worse, so it's good to think about what kind of veneer you shellac yourself with. How superficial it may seep into your skin and into your blood stream and totally take over your heart, your brain, everything.

It has long been my belief that in times of great stress, such as a 4-day vacation, the thin veneer of family wears off almost at once, and we are revealed in our true personalities.

There is no short cut to achievement. Life requires thorough preparation - veneer isn't worth anything.

Drop the veneer periodically and be like "OK, I'm an imperfect human. Let's try to get through this."

I'm not tough, and I never have been. I suppose over the years I've built up kind of a veneer to protect myself because I have functioned on my own for a long, long time, and I have never had a lot of flunkies preceding me to clear the way.

The destruction that barbarians leave behind has a grim fascination, doesn't it? We're reminded how thin is the veneer of civilization.

What matters is discovering myself under the veneer, under the layers that are wrapped around me. There are two 'yous'; there's 'you', the real you, and then there's the image.

In 'Age of Innocence,' the opening flowers, that's a metaphor for the film, the Victorian veneer with the malevolence beneath it. We attempted to show that with flowers that start as sweet and then slowly become malevolent.

I really like raw connections, and so I've always had a harder time in politics because I feel there's a lot of veneer around everything.

Maybe there's a sort of veneer of optimism about U.S. comedy, whereas perhaps in England, we don't mind ending it on a sourer note.

What I really wanted to do was take this character and go beneath the veneer of Lucifer. Underneath it all, there was a guy who was a hurt soul and rejected from his father. How that played upon his choices was kind of interesting, but also it's going inside a shell of someone who doesn't know what an emotion is.

I belong to the middle class that grew up very influenced by the Catholic church. The people of the novel are from a more pagan and practical world in which the Christianity is just a veneer.

...no matter how complex or affluent, human societies are nothing but subsystems of the biosphere, the Earth's thin veneer of life, which is ultimately run by bacteria, fungi and green plants.

The unconscious mind is decidedly simple, unaffected, straightforward and honest. It hasn't got all of this facade, this veneer of what we call adult culture. It's rather simple, rather childish It is direct and free.

In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design.

Quiet book-learning in monasteries and ethereal music, sonnets and courtly lovethat stuff is all fantasyand veneer? You couldn't afford to let the beauty of the thing seduce you too far or you forgot the truth and the truth was always hard as iron bloody bars.

As a teenager, Tiger was self-assured and mature, yet also warm and charming. But the warm outward veneer gradually changed. When he pulled off his 'win for the ages' at the 1997 Masters, he already was sharing less of his softer, emotional side.

If you hate something, you hate it, and if you like something or somebody, you like it, but tell the truth. And most celebrities have that thin veneer that they will not break for you.

Hope is tomorrow's veneer over today's disappointment.

Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.

Leftism hides under an intellectual veneer, but underneath it is all emotion

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.

The mainstream media spins stories that are largely racist, violent, and irresponsible - stories that celebrate power and demonize victims, all the while camouflaging its pedagogical influence under the cheap veneer of entertainment.

No one finds it interesting to look at the person who is perfect all the time. They have no flaws. Flaws are what open us up to another person to show that we are not having a veneer, a fake sort of exterior.

Underneath this veneer of slightly crazy and mildly socially retarded, I'm a complete disaster.

I think of part of myself as a very passionate person, but I don't think that comes across. I don't know where it comes from, that reserve or veneer of British niceness. But it doesn't bother me if other people don't spot the passion. I know it's there.

Under the veneer of Westernization, the cultures of the Indian world - which have existed for 30,000 years! - continue to live. Sometimes in a magical way, sometimes in the shadows.

It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.

Accustomed to the veneer of noise, to the shibboleths of promotion, public relations, and market research, society is suspicious of those who value silence.

Barrons has something the rest of us don't have. I don't know what it is, but I feel it all the time, especially when we're standing close. Beneath the expensive clothes, unplaceable accent, and cultured veneer, there's something that never crawled all the way out of the swamp. It didn't want to. It likes it there.

The suburbs have this veneer of happiness, you know? This veneer of the ideal life. From afar, it's all together - white picket fence, nice house - but you peel away one little layer, and it all comes crumbling down.

Arrogance is a veneer -- a thin covering of excuses hiding deep performance deficiencies.

There is certainly a longstanding idea within western culture that civilization is only a thin veneer. As soon as something happens, say a war or a natural disaster or an epidemic like we're going through right now, the worst comes out in each of us.

Far from poisoning the mind, pornography shows the deepest truth about sexuality, stripped of romantic veneer.

If being open and honest with my customers is naive then it's fine with me. CEOs who hide behind that all-seeing, all-knowing veneer are playing a game anyway, it's not real. I am quite happy to be seen for who I am.