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Hereditary right should be kept sacred, not from any inalienable right in a particular family, but to avoid the consequences that usually attend the ambition of competitors.

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
Consequence
Ambition
Inalienable
Sacred
Hereditary
Usually
Attend
Particular
Competitors
Consequences
Family
Avoid
Government
Kept
Right

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I row after health like a waterman.
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God hath intended our passions to prevail over reason.
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Fools are apt to imitate only the defects of their betters.
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Reason is a very light rider, and easily shook off.
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I'm as old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth.
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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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A lie is an excuse guarded
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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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That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy.
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Real vision is the ability to see the invisible.
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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 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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The two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.
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When men grow virtuous in their old age, they only make a sacrifice to God of the devil's leavings.
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There's none so blind as they that won't see.
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Small causes are sufficient to make a man uneasy, when great ones are not in the way: for want of a block he will stumble at a straw.
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Wise people are never less alone than when they are alone.
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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.
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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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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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