Quote

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.

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
Written
Likewise
Law
Observed
Society
Mortal
Understand
Hath
Care
Peculiar
Chant
Take
Mortals
Jargon
Laws
Multiply
Special
Wherein

More quotes by Jonathan Swift

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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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Let a man be ne'er so wise, he may be caught with sober lies.
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Unjustly poets we asperse: Truth shines the brighter clad in verse, And all the fictions they pursue Do but insinuate what is true.
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Books, the children of the brain.
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Under the rose, since here are none but friends, To own the truth we have some private ends.
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Liberty of conscience is nowadays only understood to be the liberty of believing what men please, but also of endeavoring to propagate that belief as much as they can.
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A maxim in law has more weight in the world than an article of faith.
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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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Praise is the daughter of present power.
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That incessant envy wherewith the common rate of mankind pursues all superior natures to their own.
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Wise people are never less alone than when they are alone.
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Under this window in stormy weather I marry this man and woman together Let none but Him who rules the thunder Put this man and woman asunder.
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Where Young must torture his invention To flatter knaves, or lose his pension.
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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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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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Polite Conversation Why, everyone one as they like as the good woman said when she kissed her cow.
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I shall be like that tree-I shall die at the top.
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Pedantry is properly the over-rating of any kind of knowledge we pretend to.
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I would rather be a freeman among slaves than a slave among freemen.
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What vexes me most is, that my female friends, who could bear me very well a dozen years ago, have now forsaken me, although I am not so old in proportion to them as I formerly was: which I can prove by arithmetic, for then I was double their age, which now I am not. Letter to Alexander Pope. 7 Feb. 1736.
Jonathan Swift