Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swiftwas an Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer, poet and cleric who became Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth30 November 1667
CountryIreland
littles gullivers-travels philosopher
Undoubtedly, philosophers are in the right when they tell us that nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison.
weed honesty men
Some men, under the notion of weeding out prejudice, eradicate virtue, honesty and religion.
men talent punning
Punning is a talent which no man affects to despise but he that is without it.
taught-us opinion remember
I remember it was with extreme difficulty that I could bring my master to understand the meaning of the word opinion, or how a point could be disputable; because reason taught us to affirm or deny only where we are certain; and beyond our knowledge we cannot do either.
distance men comfort
If a man makes me keep my distance, the comfort is, he keeps his at the same time.
criticism opinion passages
That was excellently observed’, say I, when I read a passage in an author, where his opinion agrees with mine. When we differ, there I pronounce him to be mistaken.
sarcastic fine-words wonder
Fine words! I wonder where you stole them.
justice judging office
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.
race earth littles
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.
time world lasts
Ever eating, never cloying, All-devouring, all-destroying Never finding full repast, Till I eat the world at last.
sarcasm glasses world
Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind reception it meets with in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.
country men enemy
Ingratitude is amongst them a capital crime, as we read it to have been in some other countries: for they reason thus; that whoever makes ill-returns to his benefactor, must needs be a common enemy to the rest of the mankind, from where he has received no obligations and therefore such man is not fit to live.
happiness possession deceived
Happiness is the perpetual possession of being well deceived.
sarcastic clothes pitchforks
She wears her clothes as if they were thrown on with a pitchfork.