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

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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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There are few, very few, that will own themselves in a mistake.
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Every day is an opportunity to make a new happy ending. May you live all the days of your life.
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They say fingers were made before forks, and hands before knives.
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In oratory the greatest art is to hide art.
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If a man makes me keep my distance, the comfort is, he keeps his at the same time.
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Old men and comets have been reverenced for the same reason: their long beards, and pretences to foretell events.
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Sweeping from butcher's stalls, dung, guts, and blood, Drown'd puppies, stinking sprats, all drench'd in mud, Dead cats, and turnip-tops, come tumbling down the flood.
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If a man will observe as he walks the streets, I believe he will find the merriest countenances in mourning coaches.
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By candle-light nobody would have taken you for above five-and-twenty.
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Polite Conversation Why, everyone one as they like as the good woman said when she kissed her cow.
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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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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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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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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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Where Young must torture his invention To flatter knaves, or lose his pension.
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The more careless, the more modish.
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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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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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He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.
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