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Modesty may make a fool seem a man of sense.

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
Men
Modesty
Virtuous
Fool
Seem
Sense
Seems
May
Make
Blushing

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One enemy can do more hurt than ten friends can do good.
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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.
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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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Ah, a German and a genius ! A prodigy, admit him !
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You should never be ashamed to admit you have been wrong. It only proves you are wiser today than yesterday
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Simplicity, without which no human performance can arrive at perfection.
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This wine should be eaten, it is too good to be drunk.
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Satire, being levelled at all, is never resented for an offence by any.
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Hereditary right should be kept sacred, not from any inalienable right in a particular family, but to avoid the consequences that usually attend the ambition of competitors.
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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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That incessant envy wherewith the common rate of mankind pursues all superior natures to their own.
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Cruel people are ever cowards in emergency.
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I cannot but conclude that the Bulk of your Natives, to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth.
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We are so fond on one another because our ailments are the same.
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I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.
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Interest is the spur of the people, but glory that of great souls. Invention is the talent of youth, and judgment of age.
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It is a maxim, that those, to whom everybody allows the second place, have an undoubted title to the first.
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Come, agree, the law's costly.
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Where Young must torture his invention To flatter knaves, or lose his pension.
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For poetry, he's past his prime, He takes an hour to find a rhyme His fire is out, his wit decayed, His fancy sunk, his muse a jade. I'd have him throw away his pen, But there's no talking to some men.
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