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'T is an old maxim in the schools, That flattery 's the food of fools Yet now and then your men of wit Will condescend to take a bit.

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
Cooking
Fool
Condescend
Bits
Maxim
Food
Maxims
School
Flattery
Take
Fools
Men
Wit
Schools

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The two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.
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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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It is pleasant to observe how free the present age is in laying taxes on the next. Future ages shall talk of this they shall be famous to all posterity whereas their time and thoughts will be taken up about present things, as ours are now.
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By the laws of God, of nature, of nations, and of your country you are and ought to be as free a people as your brethren in England.
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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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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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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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When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
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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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Philosophy! the lumber of the schools.
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It may pass for a maxim in State, that the administration cannot be placed in too few hands, nor the legislature in too many.
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A college joke to cure the dumps.
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Then, rising with Aurora's light, The Muse invoked, sit down to write Blot out, correct, insert, refine, Enlarge, diminish, interline.
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If a man would register all his opinions upon love, politics, religion, learning etc., beginning from his youth, and so go to old age, what a bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions would appear at last.
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A wise man will find us to be rogues by our faces.
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Few are qualified to shine in company, but it is in most men's power to be agreeable.
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One enemy can do more hurt than ten friends can do good.
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It is likewise to be observed that this society hath a peculiar chant and jargon of their own, that no other mortal can understand, and wherein all their laws are written, which they take special care to multiply.
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Nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches as to conceive how others can be in want.
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Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe, how much it altered her person for the worse.
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