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One enemy can do more hurt than ten friends can do good.

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
Hurt
Enemy
Literature
Friends
Good
Ten
Military

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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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It is very unfair in any writer to employ ignorance and malice together, because it gives his answerer double work.
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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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A true critic, in the perusal of a book, is like a dog at a feast, whose thoughts and stomach are wholly set upon what the guests fling away, and consequently is apt to snarl most when there are the fewest bones.
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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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Books, the children of the brain.
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Liberty of conscience is nowadays only understood to be the liberty of believing what men please, but also of endeavoring to propagate that belief as much as they can.
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I've often wish'd that I had clear, For life, six hundred pounds a year A handsome house to lodge a friend A river at my garden's end A terrace walk, and half a rood Of land set out to plant a wood.
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If Heaven had looked upon riches to be a valuable thing, it would not have given them to such a scoundrel.
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She wears her clothes as if they were thrown on with a pitchfork.
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What vexes me most is, that my female friends, who could bear me very well a dozen years ago, have now forsaken me, although I am not so old in proportion to them as I formerly was: which I can prove by arithmetic, for then I was double their age, which now I am not. Letter to Alexander Pope. 7 Feb. 1736.
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She 's no chicken she 's on the wrong side of thirty, if she be a day.
Jonathan Swift
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What religion is he of? Why, he is an Anythingarian.
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Under the rose, since here are none but friends, To own the truth we have some private ends.
Jonathan Swift
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In oratory the greatest art is to hide art.
Jonathan Swift
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I wonder what fool it was that first invented kissing.
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My Lawyer being practiced almost from his Cradle in defending Falsehood is quite out of his Element when he would be an Advocate for Justice, which as an Office unnatural, he always attempts with great Awkwardness if not with Ill-will.
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In men desire begets love, and in women love begets desire.
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War: that mad game the world so loves to play.
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Fine words! I wonder where you stole them.
Jonathan Swift