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Men of wit, learning and virtue might strike out every offensive or unbecoming passage from plays.

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
Virtue
Passages
Might
Offensive
Play
Strike
Every
Wit
Men
Plays
Strikes
Drama
Unbecoming
Learning
Passage

More quotes by Jonathan Swift

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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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Liberty of conscience is nowadays only understood to be the liberty of believing what men please, but also of endeavoring to propagate that belief as much as they can.
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There is nothing in this world constant, but inconstancy.
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In oratory the greatest art is to hide art.
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Polite Conversation Why, everyone one as they like as the good woman said when she kissed her cow.
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Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe, how much it altered her person for the worse.
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In men desire begets love, and in women love begets desire.
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That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy.
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A tavern is a place where madness is sold by the bottle.
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Pray steal me not, I'm Mrs. Dingley's, Whose heart in this four-footed thing lies.
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The preaching of divines helps to preserve well-inclined men in the course of virtue, but seldom or ever reclaims the vicious.
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Hail, follow, well met, All dirty and wet: Find out, if you can, Who's master, who's man.
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Careful observers may foretell the hour (By sure prognostics) when to dread a show'r. While rain depends, the pensive cat gives o'er Her frolics, and pursues her tail no more.
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A carpenter is known by his chips.
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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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I hate nobody: I am in charity with the world.
Jonathan Swift
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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.
Jonathan Swift
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Nothing is so great an example of bad manners as flattery. If you flatter all the company, you please none If you flatter only one or two, you offend the rest.
Jonathan Swift
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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.
Jonathan Swift
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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.
Jonathan Swift