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

Jonathan Swift

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Jonathan Swift
Age: 77 †
Born: 1667
Born: November 30
Died: 1745
Died: October 19
Essayist
Human Rights Activist
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Pamphleteer
Philosopher
Poet
Priest
Prosaist
Public Figure
Dublin city
Isaac Bickerstaff
M. B. Drapier
Lemuel Gulliver
Simon Wagstaff
Consent
Definition
Definitions
Slavery
Government
Reason
Without
Governed

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Nothing is so great an example of bad manners as flattery. If you flatter all the company, you please none If you flatter only one or two, you offend the rest.
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Where Young must torture his invention To flatter knaves, or lose his pension.
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There is nothing in this world constant, but inconstancy.
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War: that mad game the world so loves to play.
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A fig for your bill of fare show me your bill of company.
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Love why do we one passion call, When 'tis a compound of them all? Where hot and cold, where sharp and sweet, In all their equipages meet Where pleasures mix'd with pains appear, Sorrow with joy, and hope with fear.
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In all I wish, how happy should I be, Thou grand Deluder, were it not for thee? So weak thou art that fools thy power despise And yet so strong, thou triumph'st o'er the wise.
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I never knew any man cured of inattention.
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For the rest, whatever we have got has been by infinite labor, and search, and ranging through every corner of nature the difference is that instead of dirt and poison, we have rather chosen to fill our hives with honey and wax, thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.
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What they do in heaven we are ignorant of what they do not do we are told expressly.
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The first springs of great events, like those of great rivers, are often mean and little.
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Books, the children of the brain.
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It is very unfair in any writer to employ ignorance and malice together, because it gives his answerer double work.
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He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.
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They say fingers were made before forks, and hands before knives.
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Pride, ill nature, and want of sense are the three great sources of ill manners without some one of these defects, no man will behave himself ill for want of experience, or what, in the language of fools, is called knowing the world.
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There is no quality so contrary to any nature which one cannot affect, and put on upon occasion, in order to serve an interest.
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For, if we take an examination of what is generally understood by happiness, as it has respect either to the understanding or the senses, we shall find all its properties and adjuncts will herd under this short definition: that it is a perpetual possession of being well deceived.
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Pedantry is properly the over-rating of any kind of knowledge we pretend to.
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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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