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Let a man be ne'er so wise, he may be caught with sober lies.

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
May
Men
Falsehood
Sober
Caught
Lies
Wise
Lying

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Praise is the daughter of present power.
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He was a fiddler, and consequently a rogue.
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A tavern is a place where madness is sold by the bottle.
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Ever eating, never cloying, All-devouring, all-destroying Never finding full repast, Till I eat the world at last.
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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 always love to begin a journey on Sundays, because I shall have the prayers of the church to preserve all that travel by land, or water.
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A fig for your bill of fare show me your bill of company.
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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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What they do in heaven we are ignorant of what they do not do we are told expressly.
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I would rather be a freeman among slaves than a slave among freemen.
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It is in men as in soils where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not.
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Men of great parts are often unfortunate in the management of public business, because they are apt to go out of the common road by the quickness of their imagination.
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The two maxims of any great man at court are, always to keep his countenance, and never to keep his word.
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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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Conversation is but carving! Give no more to every guest Than he's able to digest.
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Possession, they say, is eleven points of the law.
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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, if we take an examination of what is generally understood by happiness, as it has respect either to the understanding or the senses, we shall find all its properties and adjuncts will herd under this short definition: that it is a perpetual possession of being well deceived.
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Come, agree, the law's costly.
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