Jonathan Swift Quotes

Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.

We have enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.

For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.

Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.

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.

Promises and pie-crust are made to be broken.

When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.

You should never be ashamed to admit you have been wrong. It only proves you are wiser today than yesterday

The sight of you is good for sore eyes.

He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.

A wise man will find us to be rogues by our faces.

It is the first rule in oratory that a man must appear such as he would persuade others to be: and that can be accomplished only by the force of his life.

So geographers, in Africa maps, With savage pictures fill their gaps, And o'er uninhabitable downs Place elephants for want of towns

A fig for partridges and quails, ye dainties I know nothing of ye; But on the highest mount in Wales Would choose in peace to drink my coffee.

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.

There are few wild beasts more to be dreaded than a talking man having nothing to say.

'Tis happy for him that his Father was born before him.

Coffee makes us severe, and grave and philosophical.

A wise man should have money in his head, but not in his heart.

I cannot but conclude that the Bulk of your Natives, to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth.

Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect.

Every man desires to live long, but no man wishes to be old.

May you live all the days of your life.

When I am reading a book, whether wise or silly, it seems to me to be alive and talking to me.

Power is no blessing in itself, except when it is used to protect the innocent.

He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put into vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw, inclement summers.

Nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches as to conceive how others can be in want.

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.

There is nothing constant in this world but inconsistency.

We of this age have discovered a shorter, and more prudent method to become scholars and wits, without the fatigue of reading or of thinking.

War: that mad game the world so loves to play.

I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.

There's none so blind as they that won't see.

It is the talent of human nature to run from one extreme to another.

Tell truth, and shame the devil.

This is every cook's opinion - no savory dish without an onion, but lest your kissing should be spoiled your onions must be fully boiled.

An excuse is a lie guarded.

Cruel people are ever cowards in emergency.

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.

I never knew a man come to greatness or eminence who lay abed late in the morning.

Wise people are never less alone than when they are alone.

The worthiest people are the most injured by slander, as is the best fruit which the birds have been pecking at.

Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.

No wise man ever wished to be younger.

Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but corruptions.

I never saw, heard, nor read, that the clergy were beloved in any nation where Christianity was the religion of the country. Nothing can render them popular, but some degree of persecution.

Hail fellow, well met.

You cannot reason a person out of something they were not reasoned into.

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.

Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.