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I never knew any man cured of inattention.

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
Never
Men
Inattention
Cured
Knew
Attention

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Men are happy to be laughed at for their humor, but not for their folly.
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It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.
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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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It is very unfair in any writer to employ ignorance and malice together, because it gives his answerer double work.
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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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A fig for your bill of fare show me your bill of company.
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In church your grandsire cut his throat to do the job too long he tarried: he should have had my hearty vote to cut his throat before he married.
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I'll give you leave to call me anything, if you don't call me spade.
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Big-endians and small-endians.
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Had Windham possessed discretion in debate, or Sheridan in conduct, they might have ruled their age.
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Religion seems to have grown an infant with age, and requires miracles to nurse it, as it had in its infancy.
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I remember it was with extreme difficulty that I could bring my master to understand the meaning of the word opinion, or how a point could be disputable because reason taught us to affirm or deny only where we are certain and beyond our knowledge we cannot do either.
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My nose itched, and I knew I should drink wine or kiss a fool.
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And, is not Virtue in Mankind The Nutriment that feeds the Mind?
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Unjustly poets we asperse: Truth shines the brighter clad in verse, And all the fictions they pursue Do but insinuate what is true.
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With a whirl of thought oppressed I sink from reverie to rest. An horrid vision seized my head, I saw the graves give up their dead.
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Under the rose, since here are none but friends, To own the truth we have some private ends.
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What they do in heaven we are ignorant of what they do not do we are told expressly.
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Then, rising with Aurora's light, The Muse invoked, sit down to write Blot out, correct, insert, refine, Enlarge, diminish, interline.
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A true critic, in the perusal of a book, is like a dog at a feast, whose thoughts and stomach are wholly set upon what the guests fling away, and consequently is apt to snarl most when there are the fewest bones.
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