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It often happens that, if a lie be believed only for an hour, it has done its work, and there is no further occasion for it.

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
Lying
Often
Happens
Occasion
Done
Occasions
Work
Believed
Hour
Belief
Hours

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Religion seems to have grown an infant with age, and requires miracles to nurse it, as it had in its infancy.
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I always love to begin a journey on Sundays, because I shall have the prayers of the church to preserve all that travel by land, or water.
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I can discover no political evil in suffering bullies, sharpers, and rakes, to rid the world of each other by a method of their own where the law hath not been able to find an expedient.
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I hate nobody: I am in charity with the world.
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Punning is a talent which no man affects to despise but he that is without it.
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I cannot imagine why we should be at the expense to furnish wit for succeeding ages, when the former have made no sort of provision for ours.
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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 an uncontrolled truth, that no man ever made an ill figure who understood his own talents, nor a good one who mistook them.
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Your onions should be thoroughly boiled.
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This made me reflect, how vain an attempt it is for a man to endeavor to do himself honor among those who are out of all degree of equality or comparison with him.
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Very few men, properly speaking, live at present, but are providing to live another time.
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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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You cannot reason a person out of something they were not reasoned into.
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Daphne knows, with equal ease, How to vex and how to please But the folly of her sex Makes her sole delight to vex.
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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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It is with wits as with razors, which are never so apt to cut those they are employed on as when they have lost their edge.
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There never appear more than five or six men of genius in an age, but if they were united the world could not stand before them.
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I have known some men possessed of good qualities which were very serviceable to others, but useless to themselves like a sun-dial on the front of a house, to inform the neighbours and passengers, but not the owner within.
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A footman may swear but he cannot swear like a lord. He can swear as often: but can he swear with equal delicacy, propriety, and judgment?
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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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