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Where Young must torture his invention To flatter knaves, or lose his pension.

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
Invention
Lose
Loses
Young
Knaves
Must
Flatter
Pension
Flattery
Torture

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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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I would rather be a freeman among slaves than a slave among freemen.
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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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Big-endians and small-endians.
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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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Fine words! I wonder where you stole them.
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One enemy can do more hurt than ten friends can do good.
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I shall be like that tree-I shall die at the top.
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I am convinced that if the virtuosi could once find out a world in the moon, with a passage to it, our women would wear nothing but what directly came from thence.
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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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I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.
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There are few wild beasts more to be dreaded than a talking man having nothing to say.
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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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The axe of intemperance has lopped off his green boughs and left him a withered trunk.
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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.
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She wears her clothes as if they were thrown on with a pitchfork.
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Ah, a German and a genius ! A prodigy, admit him !
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I row after health like a waterman.
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I have known some men possessed of good qualities which were very serviceable to others, but useless to themselves like a sun-dial on the front of a house, to inform the neighbours and passengers, but not the owner within.
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