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Flattery is the worst and falsest way of showing our esteem.

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
Flattery
Showing
Esteem
Worst
Way

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Where I am not understood, it shall be concluded that something very useful and profound is couched underneath.
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Punning is a talent which no man affects to despise but he that is without it.
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By candle-light nobody would have taken you for above five-and-twenty.
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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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He was a fiddler, and consequently a rogue.
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Ah, a German and a genius ! A prodigy, admit him !
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He that calls a man ungrateful sums up all the veil that a man can be guilty of.
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And, is not Virtue in Mankind The Nutriment that feeds the Mind?
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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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A lie is an excuse guarded
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A forward critic often dupes us With sham quotations peri hupsos, And if we have not read Longinus, Will magisterially outshine us. Then, lest with Greek he over-run ye, Procure the book for love or money, Translated from Boileau's translation, And quote quotation on quotation.
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One enemy can do more hurt than ten friends can do good.
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No man was ever so completely skilled in the conduct of life, as not to receive new information from age and experience.
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For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.
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Blot out, correct, insert, refine, enlarge, diminish, interline. Be mindful, when invention fails. To scratch your head and bite your nails.
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Love why do we one passion call, When 'tis a compound of them all? Where hot and cold, where sharp and sweet, In all their equipages meet Where pleasures mix'd with pains appear, Sorrow with joy, and hope with fear.
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What we call the Irish Brogue is no sooner discovered, than it makes the deliverer, in the last degree, ridiculous and despised and, from such a mouth, an Englishman expects nothing but bulls, blunders, and follies.
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Positiveness is a good quality for preachers and speakers because, whoever shares his thoughts with the public will convince them as he himself appears convinced.
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The two maxims of any great man at court are, always to keep his countenance, and never to keep his word.
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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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