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Although the devil be the father of lies, he seems, like other great inventors, to have lost much of his reputation by the continual improvements that have been made upon him.

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
Seems
Reputation
Great
Although
Much
Devil
Inventors
Made
Lies
Improvements
Like
Lying
Continual
Upon
Inventor
Father
Falsehood
Lost
Improvement

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Coffee makes us severe, and grave and philosophical.
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The example alone of a vicious prince will corrupt an age but that of a good one will not reform it.
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God hath intended our passions to prevail over reason.
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The system of morality to be gathered from the ancient sages falls very short of that delivered in the gospel.
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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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It may pass for a maxim in State, that the administration cannot be placed in too few hands, nor the legislature in too many.
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I won't quarrel with my bread and butter.
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It often happens that, if a lie be believed only for an hour, it has done its work, and there is no further occasion for it.
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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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Pride, ill nature, and want of sense, are the three great sources of ill manners.
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A little grain of the romance is no ill ingredient to preserve and exalt the dignity of human nature, without which it is apt to degenerate into everything that is sordid, vicious and low.
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When we desire or solicit anything, our minds run wholly on the good side or circumstances of it when it is obtained, our minds run wholly on the bad ones.
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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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Triumphant Tories, and desponding Whigs, Forget their feuds, and join to save their wigs.
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It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by providence as an evil to mankind.
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I would rather be a freeman among slaves than a slave among freemen.
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Do you think I was born in a wood to be afraid of an owl?
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In all I wish, how happy should I be, Thou grand Deluder, were it not for thee? So weak thou art that fools thy power despise And yet so strong, thou triumph'st o'er the wise.
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I cannot imagine why we should be at the expense to furnish wit for succeeding ages, when the former have made no sort of provision for ours.
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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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