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

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Careful observers may foretell the hour (By sure prognostics) when to dread a show'r. While rain depends, the pensive cat gives o'er Her frolics, and pursues her tail no more.
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My Lawyer being practiced almost from his Cradle in defending Falsehood is quite out of his Element when he would be an Advocate for Justice, which as an Office unnatural, he always attempts with great Awkwardness if not with Ill-will.
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The lack of belief is a defect that ought to be concealed when it cannot be overcome.
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I'm as old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth.
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A maxim in law has more weight in the world than an article of faith.
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By the laws of God, of nature, of nations, and of your country you are and ought to be as free a people as your brethren in England.
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In like manner, the disbelief of a Divine Providence renders a man uncapable of holding any public station for, since kings avow themselves to be the deputies of Providence.
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It is not so much the being exempt from faults as the having overcome them that is an advantage to us it being with the follies of the mind as with weeds of a field, which if destroyed and consumed upon the place where they grow, enrich and improve it more than if none had ever sprung there.
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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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By candle-light nobody would have taken you for above five-and-twenty.
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One enemy can do more hurt than ten friends can do good.
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Men of wit, learning and virtue might strike out every offensive or unbecoming passage from plays.
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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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With a whirl of thought oppressed I sink from reverie to rest. An horrid vision seized my head, I saw the graves give up their dead.
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A little grain of the romance is no ill ingredient to preserve and exalt the dignity of human nature, without which it is apt to degenerate into everything that is sordid, vicious and low.
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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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I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.
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Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but corruptions.
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There is nothing in this world constant, but inconstancy.
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If you were not reasoned into your beliefs, you cannot be reasoned out of them.
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