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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
Happens
Occasion
Done
Occasions
Work
Believed
Hour
Belief
Hours
Lying
Often

More quotes by Jonathan Swift

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When men grow virtuous in their old age, they only make a sacrifice to God of the devil's leavings.
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The more careless, the more modish.
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For, if we take an examination of what is generally understood by happiness, as it has respect either to the understanding or the senses, we shall find all its properties and adjuncts will herd under this short definition: that it is a perpetual possession of being well deceived.
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A nice man is a man of nasty ideas.
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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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Just get the right syllable in the proper place.
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He was a fiddler, and consequently a rogue.
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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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For though, in nature, depth and height Are equally held infinite: In poetry, the height we know 'Tis only infinite below.
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An atheist has got one point beyond the devil.
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I am of the level with common Astrologers who, with an old paltry cant, and a few pot-hooks for planets to amuse the vulgar, have too long been suffered to abuse the world.
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But you think that it is time for me to have done with the world, and so I would if I could get into a better before I was called into the best, and not die here in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole.
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Cruel people are ever cowards in emergency.
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Surely mortal man is a broomstick!
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I never saw, heard, nor read, that the clergy were beloved in any nation where Christianity was the religion of the country. Nothing can render them popular, but some degree of persecution.
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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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The tucked-up sempstress walks with hasty strides, While streams run down her oil'd umbrella's sides.
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Pride, ill nature, and want of sense are the three great sources of ill manners without some one of these defects, no man will behave himself ill for want of experience, or what, in the language of fools, is called knowing the world.
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It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.
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Fine words! I wonder where you stole them.
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