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The example alone of a vicious prince will corrupt an age but that of a good one will not reform it.

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
Kings
Example
Alone
Age
Good
Corrupt
Prince
Vicious
Reform

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In oratory the greatest art is to hide art.
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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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She 's no chicken she 's on the wrong side of thirty, if she be a day.
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Some dire misfortune to portend, no enemy can match a friend.
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Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired
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Possession, they say, is eleven points of the law.
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Pedantry is properly the over-rating of any kind of knowledge we pretend to.
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Books, like men their authors, have no more than one wayofcoming intothe world, but there areten thousand to go out of it, and return no more.
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Pride, ill nature, and want of sense, are the three great sources of ill manners.
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Principally I hate and detest that animal called man although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth.
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And, is not Virtue in Mankind The Nutriment that feeds the Mind?
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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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Punning is a talent which no man affects to despise but he that is without it.
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There are but three ways for a man to revenge himself of the censure of the world,--to despise it, to return the like, or to endeavor to live so as to avoid it the first of these is usually pretended, the last is almost impossible, the universal practice is for the second.
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Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse. Whoever makes the fewest people uneasy is the best bred in the room.
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Real vision is the ability to see the invisible.
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No man of honor, as the word is usually understood, did ever pretend that his honor obliged him to be chaste or temperate, to pay his creditors, to be useful to his country, to do good to mankind, to endeavor to be wise or learned, to regard his word, his promise, or his oath.
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Vanity is a mark of humility rather than of pride.
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A college joke to cure the dumps.
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It often happens that, if a lie be believed only for an hour, it has done its work, and there is no further occasion for it.
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