Quotes from Jonathan Swift

It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of the kingdom.

Some men, under the notion of weeding out prejudice, eradicate virtue, honesty and religion.

The best doctors in the world are Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet, and Doctor Merryman.

Good manners is the art of making people comfortable. Whoever makes the fewest people uncomfortable has the best manners.

a wife should be always a reasonable and agreeable companion, because she cannot always be young.

Words are the clothing of our thoughts.

Ever eating, never cloying, All-devouring, all-destroying Never finding full repast, Till I eat the world at last.

Judges... are picked out from the most dextrous lawyers, who are grown old or lazy, and having been biased all their lives against truth or equity, are under such a fatal necessity of favoring fraud, perjury and oppression, that I have known several of them to refuse a large bribe from the side where justice lay, rather than injure the faculty by doing any thing unbecoming their nature in office.

A soldier is a Yahoo hired to kill in cold blood as many of his own Species, who have never offended him, as possibly he can.

Coffee makes us severe, and grave and philosophical.

The stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires, is like cutting off our feet, when we want shoes.

Punning is a talent which no man affects to despise but he that is without it.

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.

It is a maxim among these lawyers, that whatever hath been done before may legally be done again: and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice and the general reason of mankind. These, under the name of precedents, they produce as authorities, to justify the most iniquitous opinions; and the judges never fail of decreeing accordingly.

You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into in the first place.

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

I'm as old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth.

We have chosen to fill our hives with honey and wax; thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.

Ingratitude is amongst them a capital crime, as we read it to have been in some other countries: for they reason thus; that whoever makes ill-returns to his benefactor, must needs be a common enemy to the rest of the mankind, from where he has received no obligations and therefore such man is not fit to live.

When the world has once begun to use us ill, it afterwards continues the same treatment with less scruple or ceremony, as men do to a whore.

I hid myself between two leaves of sorrel, and there discharged the necessities of nature.

Poor Nations are hungry, and rich Nations are proud, and Pride and Hunger will ever be at Variance.

As love without esteem is capricious and volatile; esteem without love is languid and cold.

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasie, or a ragoust.