Sentence examples for a pretense to from inspiring English sources

Patient uses this as a pretense to quarantine himself from friends and family.

It gave him a pretense to break off all communication with the union; he has refused to meet personally with Keshishian or her deputies since.

The opponents fear that a Council-appointed task force would provide flawed research and a pretense to roll back smoking restrictions in the future.

In a morning briefing for foreign reporters, Mr. Morsi warned the ruling military council against using the violence as an excuse to delay the elections, reflecting a widespread fear that the council is looking for a pretense to retain power.

Xu Zhiyong, a prominent rights lawyer, was formally arrested last month on charges of "assembling a crowd to disrupt order in a public place," which many see as a pretense to silence him.

Since we first began reporting on NSA stories, there has been much debate over who is and is not a "journalist" and whether being a journalist requires "objectivity" (i.e., a pretense to not having opinions).

And finally, any pretense to a higher calling was abandoned and the profit motive overtook even our valiant front line.

Just another discarded ditty, it relies on the usual wordplay and slurred diction to obscure any pretense to a deeper meaning".

But any pretense to being a world-class outfit was hard to justify in such surroundings.

Guilty pleasures refer to cultural artifacts with mass appeal — genre novels, catchy pop songs, domestic action movies (foreign action "films," no matter how awful, tend to get a pass), TV shows other than "Breaking Bad" and "The Wire" — that bring with them an easy enjoyment without any pretense to edification.

But Democrats maintain that the gap is due more to poor planning by the LePage administration than to growth in Medicaid enrollment and that Mr. LePage is using a false pretense to push an ideological agenda.