Jonathan Swift Quotes
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You cannot reason a person out of something they were not reasoned into.
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The ruin of a State is generally preceded by an universal degeneracy of manners and contempt of religion.
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I'll give you leave to call me anything, if you don't call me spade.
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Ever eating, never cloying, All-devouring, all-destroying Never finding full repast, Till I eat the world at last.
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I forget whether advice be among the lost things which Ariosto says are to be found in the moon: that and time ought to have been there.
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Exploding many things under the name of trifles is a very false proof either of wisdom or magnanimity, and a great check to virtuous actions with regard to fame.
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Have you not observed that there is a lower kind of discretion and regularity, which seldom fails of raising men to the highest station in the court, the church, and the law?
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When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
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It is in disputes as in armies, where the weaker side sets up false lights, and makes a great noise, to make the enemy believe them more numerous and strong than they really are.
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Every dog must have his day.
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Poor nations are hungry, and rich nations are proud; and pride and hunger will ever be at variance.
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Men who possess all the advantages of life are in a state where there are many accidents to disorder and discompose, but few to please them.
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By candle-light nobody would have taken you for above five-and-twenty.
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Judges... are picked out from the most dextrous lawyers, who are grown old or lazy, and having been biased all their lives against truth or equity, are under such a fatal necessity of favoring fraud, perjury and oppression, that I have known several of them to refuse a large bribe from the side where justice lay, rather than injure the faculty by doing any thing unbecoming their nature in office.
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The more careless, the more modish.
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Vanity is a mark of humility rather than of pride.
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They say fish should swim thrice * * * first it should swim in the sea (do you mind me?) then it should swim in butter, and at last, sirrah, it should swim in good claret.
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I shall be like that tree-I shall die at the top.
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God hath intended our passions to prevail over reason.
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We are so fond on one another because our ailments are the same.
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It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by providence as an evil to mankind.
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What religion is he of? Why, he is an Anythingarian.
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Abstracts, abridgments, summaries, etc., have the same use with burning-glasses,--to collect the diffused light rays of wit and learning in authors, and make them point with warmth and quickness upon the reader's imagination.
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When a real genius appeares in this world, you'll know him by the fact that all the fools have allied against him.