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Fools are apt to imitate only the defects of their betters.

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
Betters
Imitate
Defects
Fools
Fool

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Argument, as usually managed, is the worst sort of conversation, as it is generally in books the worst sort of reading.
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No man was ever so completely skilled in the conduct of life, as not to receive new information from age and experience.
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A maxim in law has more weight in the world than an article of faith.
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You cannot reason a person out of something they were not reasoned into.
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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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The latter part of a wise person's life is occupied with curing the follies, prejudices and false opinions they contracted earlier.
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It is likewise to be observed that this society hath a peculiar chant and jargon of their own, that no other mortal can understand, and wherein all their laws are written, which they take special care to multiply.
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You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.
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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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Real vision is the ability to see the invisible.
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I cannot imagine why we should be at the expense to furnish wit for succeeding ages, when the former have made no sort of provision for ours.
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Pray steal me not, I'm Mrs. Dingley's, Whose heart in this four-footed thing lies.
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He was a fiddler, and consequently a rogue.
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Some dire misfortune to portend, no enemy can match a friend.
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... the atheists, libertines, despisers of religion ... that is to say all those who usually pass under the name of Free-thinkers.
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I'm up and down and round about, Yet all the world can't find me out Though hundreds have employed their leisure, They never yet could find my measure.
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I am convinced that if the virtuosi could once find out a world in the moon, with a passage to it, our women would wear nothing but what directly came from thence.
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Though Diogenes lived in a tub, there might be, for aught I know, as much pride under his rags, as in the fine-spun garments of the divine Plato.
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There is nothing constant in this world but inconsistency.
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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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