Quotes from Jonathan Swift

If the men of wit and genius would resolve never to complain in their works of critics and detractors, the next age would not know that they ever had any.

Say, Britain, could you ever boast, Three poets in an age at most? Our chilling climate hardly bears A sprig of bays in fifty years.

Had Windham possessed discretion in debate, or Sheridan in conduct, they might have ruled their age.

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

Where I am not understood, it shall be concluded that something very useful and profound is couched underneath.

It often happens that, if a lie be believed only for an hour, it has done its work, and there is no further occasion for it.

It is very unfair in any writer to employ ignorance and malice together, because it gives his answerer double work.

The want of belief is a defect that ought to be concealed when it cannot be overcome.

Orators inflame the people, whose anger is really but a short fit of madness.

In oratory the greatest art is to hide art.

O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.

Poor nations are hungry, and rich nations are proud; and pride and hunger will ever be at variance.

If they would, for Example, praise the Beauty of a Woman, or any other Animal, they describe it by Rhombs, Circles, Parallelograms, Ellipses, and other geometrical terms.

Some people take more care to hide their wisdom, than their folly.

How is it possible to expect mankind to take advice when they will not so much as take warning?

An excuse is a lie guarded.

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.

Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.

One enemy can do more hurt than ten friends can do good.

Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.

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

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.

Oh how our neighbour lifts his nose, To tell what every schoolboy knows.

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