“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.”
Voyage to Brobdingnag, Ch. 6
Source: Gulliver's Travels (1726)
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Jonathan Swift 141
Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet 1667–1745Related quotes

“God made the bulk; surfaces were invented by the devil.”
As quoted in Growth, Dissolution, and Pattern Formation in Geosystems (1999) by Bjørn Jamtveit and Paul Meakin, p. 291

Hirabayashi v. United States, 320 U.S. 81, 100 (1943).
“When your suffering is a little greater than my suffering, I feel like I am a little cruel.”
Cuando tu dolor es un poco mayor que mi dolor, me siento un poco cruel.
Voces (1943)

Watchword for the Roman Republic (1849)

"The First and the Last Catastrophe" in Popular Science Monthly (Vol. 7, (July 1875)
Context: It is a very serious thing to consider that not only the earth itself and all that beautiful face of Nature we see, but also the living things upon it, and all the consciousness of men, and the ideas of society, which have grown up upon the surface, must come to an end. We who hold that belief must just face the fact and make the best of it; and I think we are helped in this by the words of that Jew philosopher who was himself a worthy crown to the splendid achievements of his race in the cause of progress during the middle ages, Benedict Spinoza. He said, "The freeman thinks of nothing so little as of death, and his contemplation is not of death but of life." Our interest, it seems to me, lies with so much of the past as may serve to guide our actions in the present, and to intensify our pious allegiance to the fathers who have gone before us, and the brethren who are with us; and our interest lies with so much of the future as we may hope will be appreciably affected by our good actions now. Beyond that, as it seems to me, we do not know, and we ought not to care. Do I seem to say, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die?" Far from it; on the contrary, I say, "Let us take hands and help, for this day we are alive together."