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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
Hours
Lying
Often
Happens
Occasion
Done
Occasions
Work
Believed
Hour
Belief

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Although men are accused of not knowing their own weakness, yet perhaps few know their own strength. It is in men as in soils, where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not of.
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That was excellently observed’, say I, when I read a passage in an author, where his opinion agrees with mine. When we differ, there I pronounce him to be mistaken.
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There are few, very few, that will own themselves in a mistake.
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Small causes are sufficient to make a man uneasy, when great ones are not in the way: for want of a block he will stumble at a straw.
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Argument, as usually managed, is the worst sort of conversation, as it is generally in books the worst sort of reading.
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Where Young must torture his invention To flatter knaves, or lose his pension.
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Modesty may make a fool seem a man of sense.
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... the atheists, libertines, despisers of religion ... that is to say all those who usually pass under the name of Free-thinkers.
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Real vision is the ability to see the invisible.
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The more careless, the more modish.
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A wise man will find us to be rogues by our faces.
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All panegyrics are mingled with an infusion of poppy.
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Perpetual aiming at wit is a very bad part of conversation. It is done to support a character: it generally fails it is a sort of insult on the company, and a restraint upon the speaker.
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Fine words! I wonder where you stole them.
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Ingratitude is amongst them a capital crime, as we read it to have been in some other countries: for they reason thus that whoever makes ill-returns to his benefactor, must needs be a common enemy to the rest of the mankind, from where he has received no obligations and therefore such man is not fit to live.
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When we desire or solicit anything, our minds run wholly on the good side or circumstances of it when it is obtained, our minds run wholly on the bad ones.
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Conversation is but carving! Give no more to every guest Than he's able to digest.
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Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but corruptions.
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You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.
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Rebukes are easy from our betters, From men of quality and letters But when low dunces will affront, What man alive can stand the brunt?
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