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It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.

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
Never
Attempt
Men
Useless
Acceptance
Logic
Atheism
Religion
Reason
Reasoned
Thing
Libertarian

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A lie does not consist in the indirect position of words, but in the desire and intention, by false speaking, to deceive and injure your neighbour.
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My father had a small Estate in Nottinghamshire I was the Third of five Sons.
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Fools are apt to imitate only the defects of their betters.
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You must take the will for the deed.
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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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It is in men as in soils where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not.
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She 's no chicken she 's on the wrong side of thirty, if she be a day.
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There is no vice or folly that requires so much nicety and skill to manage as vanity nor any which by ill management makes so contemptible a figure.
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Bread is the staff of life.
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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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Books, the children of the brain.
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A traveler's chief aim should be to make men wiser and better, and to improve their minds by the bad-as well as good example of what they deliver concerning foreign places.
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I am convinced that if the virtuosi could once find out a world in the moon, with a passage to it, our women would wear nothing but what directly came from thence.
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One principal object of good-breeding is to suit our behaviour to the three several degrees of men, our superiors, our equals, and those below us.
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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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Lord, Madame, I have fed like a farmer I shall grow as fat as a porpoise.
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If a lump of soot falls into the soup and you cannot conveniently get it out, stir it well in and it will give the soup a French taste.
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Vision is the Art of seeing Things invisible.
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That incessant envy wherewith the common rate of mankind pursues all superior natures to their own.
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Principally I hate and detest that animal called man although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth.
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