Jonathan Swift Quotes
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I cannot but conclude that the Bulk of your Natives, to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth.
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Come, agree, the law's costly.
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I must complain the cards are ill shuffled till I have a good hand.
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There are few wild beasts more to be dreaded than a talking man having nothing to say.
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Possession, they say, is eleven points of the law.
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Pray steal me not, I'm Mrs. Dingley's, Whose heart in this four-footed thing lies.
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I will venture to affirm, that the three seasons wherein our corn has miscarried did no more contribute to our present misery, than one spoonful of water thrown upon a rat already drowned would contribute to his death; and that the present plentiful harvest, although it should be followed by a dozen ensuing, would no more restore us, than it would the rat aforesaid to put him near the fire, which might indeed warm his fur-coat, but never bring him back to life.
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A traveler's chief aim should be to make men wiser and better, and to improve their minds by the bad-as well as good example of what they deliver concerning foreign places.
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I never knew any man cured of inattention.
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In all assemblies, though you wedge them ever so close, we may observe this peculiar property, that over their heads there is room enough; but how to reach it is the difficult point. To this end the philosopher's way in all ages has been by erecting certain edifices in the air.
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Hobbes clearly proves, that every creature Lives in a state of war by nature.
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He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.
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How is it possible to expect that mankind will take advice when they will not so much as take warning.
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Arbitrary power is the natural object of temptation to a prince, as wine and women to a young fellow, or a bribe to a judge, or avarice to old age.
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Religion seems to have grown an infant with age, and requires miracles to nurse it, as it had in its infancy.
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He was a fiddler, and consequently a rogue.
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Ale is meat, drink and cloth; it will make a cat speak and a wise man dumb.
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This wine should be eaten, it is too good to be drunk.
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It is not so much the being exempt from faults as the having overcome them that is an advantage to us; it being with the follies of the mind as with weeds of a field, which if destroyed and consumed upon the place where they grow, enrich and improve it more than if none had ever sprung there.
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Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.
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Old men and comets have been reverenced for the same reason: their long beards, and pretences to foretell events.
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And he gave it for his opinion, "that whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.
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"Lawyers Are": Those whose interests and abilities lie in perverting, confounding and eluding the law.
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The tiny Lilliputians surmise that Gulliver's watch may be his god, because it is that which, he admits, he seldom does anything without consulting.