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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
Vicious
Reform
Kings
Example
Alone
Age
Good
Corrupt
Prince

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A college joke to cure the dumps.
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It is a maxim, that those, to whom everybody allows the second place, have an undoubted title to the first.
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Where I am not understood, it shall be concluded that something very useful and profound is couched underneath.
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Come hither, all ye empty things, Ye bubbles rais'd by breath of Kings Who float upon the tide of state, Come hither, and behold your fate. Let pride be taught by this rebuke, How very mean a thing's a Duke From all his ill-got honours flung, Turn'd to that dirt from whence he sprung.
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Surely mortal man is a broomstick!
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Few are qualified to shine in company, but it is in most men's power to be agreeable.
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Some dire misfortune to portend, no enemy can match a friend.
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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.
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Fine words! I wonder where you stole them.
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Lose no time to contradict her, Nor endeavor to convict her Only take this rule along, Always to advise her wrong, And reprove her when she's right She may then grow wise for spite.
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Rebukes are easy from our betters, From men of quality and letters But when low dunces will affront, What man alive can stand the brunt?
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The axe of intemperance has lopped off his green boughs and left him a withered trunk.
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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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Where Young must torture his invention To flatter knaves, or lose his pension.
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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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A fig for your bill of fare show me your bill of company.
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Everyone desires long life, not one old age.
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Triumphant Tories, and desponding Whigs, Forget their feuds, and join to save their wigs.
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For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.
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It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by providence as an evil to mankind.
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