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It is pleasant to observe how free the present age is in laying taxes on the next. Future ages shall talk of this they shall be famous to all posterity whereas their time and thoughts will be taken up about present things, as ours are now.

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
Free
Taxes
Next
Thoughts
Laying
Things
Present
Posterity
Time
Shall
Observe
Taken
Whereas
Talk
Ages
Age
Pleasant
Future
Famous

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You cannot reason a person out of something they were not reasoned into.
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What poet would not grieve to see His brother write as well as he? But rather than they should excel, He'd wish his rivals all in Hell.
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You should never be ashamed to admit you have been wrong. It only proves you are wiser today than yesterday
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Satire, being levelled at all, is never resented for an offence by any.
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It is with wits as with razors, which are never so apt to cut those they are employed on as when they have lost their edge.
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For though, in nature, depth and height Are equally held infinite: In poetry, the height we know 'Tis only infinite below.
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Unjustly poets we asperse: Truth shines the brighter clad in verse, And all the fictions they pursue Do but insinuate what is true.
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The more careless, the more modish.
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Lord, Madame, I have fed like a farmer I shall grow as fat as a porpoise.
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Love why do we one passion call, When 'tis a compound of them all? Where hot and cold, where sharp and sweet, In all their equipages meet Where pleasures mix'd with pains appear, Sorrow with joy, and hope with fear.
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He that calls a man ungrateful sums up all the veil that a man can be guilty of.
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Two women seldom grow intimate but at the expense of a third person.
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What vexes me most is, that my female friends, who could bear me very well a dozen years ago, have now forsaken me, although I am not so old in proportion to them as I formerly was: which I can prove by arithmetic, for then I was double their age, which now I am not. Letter to Alexander Pope. 7 Feb. 1736.
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And, is not Virtue in Mankind The Nutriment that feeds the Mind?
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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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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.
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Nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches as to conceive how others can be in want.
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But you think that it is time for me to have done with the world, and so I would if I could get into a better before I was called into the best, and not die here in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole.
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Daphne knows, with equal ease, How to vex and how to please But the folly of her sex Makes her sole delight to vex.
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Very few men, properly speaking, live at present, but are providing to live another time.
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