Quote

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.

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
Knowledge
Masters
Point
Meaning
Disputable
Understand
Beyond
Affirm
Cannot
Taught
Extreme
Certain
Bring
Extremes
Remember
Either
Deny
Reason
Opinion
Master
Word
Difficulty

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Poor nations are hungry, and rich nations are proud and pride and hunger will ever be at variance.
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If a man will observe as he walks the streets, I believe he will find the merriest countenances in mourning coaches.
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Pride, ill nature, and want of sense, are the three great sources of ill manners.
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A tavern is a place where madness is sold by the bottle.
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In oratory the greatest art is to hide art.
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What poet would not grieve to see His brother write as well as he? But rather than they should excel, He'd wish his rivals all in Hell.
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And, is not Virtue in Mankind The Nutriment that feeds the Mind?
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O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.
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Hail fellow, well met.
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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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There are but three ways for a man to revenge himself of the censure of the world,--to despise it, to return the like, or to endeavor to live so as to avoid it the first of these is usually pretended, the last is almost impossible, the universal practice is for the second.
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I shall be like that tree-I shall die at the top.
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A lie is an excuse guarded
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What we call the Irish Brogue is no sooner discovered, than it makes the deliverer, in the last degree, ridiculous and despised and, from such a mouth, an Englishman expects nothing but bulls, blunders, and follies.
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Would a writer know how to behave himself with relation td posterity? Let him consider in old books what he finds that he is glad to know, and what omissions he most laments.
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I'm up and down and round about, Yet all the world can't find me out Though hundreds have employed their leisure, They never yet could find my measure.
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Arbitrary power is but the first natural step from anarchy, or the savage life.
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The axe of intemperance has lopped off his green boughs and left him a withered trunk.
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If you were not reasoned into your beliefs, you cannot be reasoned out of them.
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Triumphant Tories, and desponding Whigs, Forget their feuds, and join to save their wigs.
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