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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.

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
Made
Wit
Ages
Former
Succeed
Furnish
Sort
Succeeding
Imagine
Provision
Age
Expense
Cannot
Expenses

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It is very unfair in any writer to employ ignorance and malice together, because it gives his answerer double work.
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It is an uncontrolled truth, that no man ever made an ill figure who understood his own talents, nor a good one who mistook them.
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I'm as old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth.
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A traveler's chief aim should be to make men wiser and better, and to improve their minds by the bad-as well as good example of what they deliver concerning foreign places.
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Old men and comets have been reverenced for the same reason: their long beards, and pretences to foretell events.
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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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And he gave it for his opinion, that whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.
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I would rather be a freeman among slaves than a slave among freemen.
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They say fish should swim thrice * * * first it should swim in the sea (do you mind me?) then it should swim in butter, and at last, sirrah, it should swim in good claret.
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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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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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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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I hate nobody: I am in charity with the world.
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Lord, Madame, I have fed like a farmer I shall grow as fat as a porpoise.
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Men of great parts are often unfortunate in the management of public business, because they are apt to go out of the common road by the quickness of their imagination.
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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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Simplicity, without which no human performance can arrive at perfection.
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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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The bulk of mankind is as well equipped for flying as thinking.
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A lie does not consist in the indirect position of words, but in the desire and intention, by false speaking, to deceive and injure your neighbour.
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