Quote

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.

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
Earth
Pernicious
Littles
Conclude
Gulliver
Ever
Suffered
Misanthropy
Little
Surface
Vermin
Race
Natives
Upon
Odious
Nature
Bulk
Cannot
Crawl

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God hath intended our passions to prevail over reason.
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Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse. Whoever makes the fewest people uneasy is the best bred in the room.
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Triumphant Tories, and desponding Whigs, Forget their feuds, and join to save their wigs.
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That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy.
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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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Real vision is the ability to see the invisible.
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So geographers, in Africa maps, With savage pictures fill their gaps, And o'er uninhabitable downs Place elephants for want of towns
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A jargon form'd from the lost language, wit, Confounded in that Babel of the pit Form'd by diseased conceptions, weak and wild, Sick lust of souls, and an abortive child Born between whores and fops, by lewd compacts, Before the play, or else between the acts Nor wonder, if from such polluted minds Should spring such short and transitory kinds.
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Where I am not understood, it shall be concluded that something very useful and profound is couched underneath.
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Story-telling is subject to two unavoidable defects,--frequent repetition and being soon exhausted so that, whoever values this gift in himself, has need of a good memory, and ought frequently to shift his company.
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If you were not reasoned into your beliefs, you cannot be reasoned out of them.
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How often do we contradict the right rules of reason in the whole course of our lives! Reason itself is true and just, but the reason of every particular man is weak and wavering, perpetually swayed and turned by his interests, his passions, and his vices.
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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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The bulk of mankind is as well equipped for flying as thinking.
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One enemy can do more hurt than ten friends can do good.
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Punning is a talent which no man affects to despise but he that is without it.
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Imaginary evils soon become real ones by indulging our reflections on them as he who in a melancholy fancy sees something like a face on the wall or the wainscot can, by two or three touches with a lead pencil, make it look visible, and agreeing with what he fancied.
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My nose itched, and I knew I should drink wine or kiss a fool.
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Once kick the world, and the world and you will live together at a reasonably good understanding.
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Praise is the daughter of present power.
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