Jonathan Swift: Trending quotes (page 2)

“I cannot but conclude 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.”

“Libertas et natale solum:
Fine words! I wonder where you stole 'em.”

“Every dog must have his day.”

“Undoubtedly, philosophers are in the right when they tell us that nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison.”

“Proper words in proper places, make the true definition of a style.”

“No wise man ever wished to be younger.”

“You should never be ashamed to admit you have been wrong. It only proves you are wiser today than yesterday”

“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.”

“For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.”

“There are few, very few, that will own themselves in a mistake, though all the World sees them to be in downright nonsense.”

“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.”

“Happiness is the perpetual possession of being well deceived.”

“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.”

“We of this age have discovered a shorter, and more prudent method to become scholars and wits, without the fatigue of reading or of thinking.”

“If a man makes me keep my distance, the comfort is, he keeps his at the same time.”

“Some men, under the notion of weeding out prejudice, eradicate virtue, honesty and religion.”

“The latter part of a wise man’s life is taken up in curing the follies, prejudices, and false opinions he had contracted in the former.”

“Ever eating, never cloying,
All-devouring, all-destroying
Never finding full repast,
Till I eat the world at last.”

“Difference in opinions has cost many millions of lives: for instance, whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh; whether the juice of a certain berry be blood or wine.”