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Ale is meat, drink and cloth it will make a cat speak and a wise man dumb.

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
Dumb
Meat
Cat
Drink
Wise
Speak
Make
Ale
Men
Cloth

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A lie is an excuse guarded
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A jargon form'd from the lost language, wit, Confounded in that Babel of the pit Form'd by diseased conceptions, weak and wild, Sick lust of souls, and an abortive child Born between whores and fops, by lewd compacts, Before the play, or else between the acts Nor wonder, if from such polluted minds Should spring such short and transitory kinds.
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When men grow virtuous in their old age, they only make a sacrifice to God of the devil's leavings.
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For the rest, whatever we have got has been by infinite labor, and search, and ranging through every corner of nature the difference is that instead of dirt and poison, we have rather chosen to fill our hives with honey and wax, thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.
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Fools are apt to imitate only the defects of their betters.
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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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Reason is a very light rider, and easily shook off.
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Many a truth is told in jest.
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A ridiculous passion which hath no being but in play-books and romances.
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Story-telling is subject to two unavoidable defects,--frequent repetition and being soon exhausted so that, whoever values this gift in himself, has need of a good memory, and ought frequently to shift his company.
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The proper words in the proper places are the true definition of style.
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I never saw, heard, nor read, that the clergy were beloved in any nation where Christianity was the religion of the country. Nothing can render them popular, but some degree of persecution.
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I can discover no political evil in suffering bullies, sharpers, and rakes, to rid the world of each other by a method of their own where the law hath not been able to find an expedient.
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Triumphant Tories, and desponding Whigs, Forget their feuds, and join to save their wigs.
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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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Flattery is the worst and falsest way of showing our esteem.
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She 's no chicken she 's on the wrong side of thirty, if she be a day.
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My horses understand me tolerably well I converse with them at least four hours every day. They are strangers to bridle or saddle they live in great amity with me, and friendship of each other.
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Such a man, truly wise, creams off Nature leaving the sour and the dregs for philosophy and reason to lap up.
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.
Jonathan Swift