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One principal object of good-breeding is to suit our behaviour to the three several degrees of men, our superiors, our equals, and those below us.

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
Three
Suit
Good
Principal
Men
Superiors
Suits
Several
Object
Breeding
Degrees
Equals
Objects
Behaviour

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Two women seldom grow intimate but at the expense of a third person.
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The stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires, is like cutting off our feet when we want shoes.
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If Heaven had looked upon riches to be a valuable thing, it would not have given them to such a scoundrel.
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I'll give you leave to call me anything, if you don't call me spade.
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In all distresses of our friends We first consult our private ends While Nature, kindly bent to ease us, Points out some circumstance to please us.
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I would rather be a freeman among slaves than a slave among freemen.
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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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They say fingers were made before forks, and hands before knives.
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Perpetual aiming at wit is a very bad part of conversation. It is done to support a character: it generally fails it is a sort of insult on the company, and a restraint upon the speaker.
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How often do we contradict the right rules of reason in the whole course of our lives! Reason itself is true and just, but the reason of every particular man is weak and wavering, perpetually swayed and turned by his interests, his passions, and his vices.
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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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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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And he gave it for his opinion, that whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.
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I row after health like a waterman.
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When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
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Had Windham possessed discretion in debate, or Sheridan in conduct, they might have ruled their age.
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If a man will observe as he walks the streets, I believe he will find the merriest countenances in mourning coaches.
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He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.
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I've often wish'd that I had clear, For life, six hundred pounds a year A handsome house to lodge a friend A river at my garden's end A terrace walk, and half a rood Of land set out to plant a wood.
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That incessant envy wherewith the common rate of mankind pursues all superior natures to their own.
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