Quotes About Satire

Hi. I'm Spider Jerusalem. I smoke. I take drugs. I drink. I wash every six weeks. I masturbate constantly and fling my steaming poison semen down from my window into your hair and food. I'm a rich and respected columnist for a major metropolitan newspaper. I live with two beautiful women in the city's most expensive and select community. Being a bastard works.

Write to amuse? What an appalling suggestion! I write to make people anxious and miserable and to worsen their indigestion.

May you fall from the top of the Chrysler Building and may people lean out their windows and hit you on the head with a baseball bat as you go by.

There are clowns who make you laugh, there are clowns who laugh with you and there are clowns who laugh at you."

your greatness will be made possible through the extremes of your personality—the very extremes that sometimes make for campfire satire and legendary stories.

La satira è l'arma più efficace contro il potere: il potere non sopporta l'umore, nemmeno i governanti cosiddetti democratici, perché ridere libera l'uomo dalle sue paure.

Congress shall also create a tax code weighing more than the combined poundage of the largest member of the House and the largest member of the Senate, plus a standard musk ox.

It's income tax time again, Americans: time to gather up those receipts, get out those tax forms, sharpen up that pencil, and stab yourself in the aorta.

Big business never pays a nickel in taxes, according to Ralph Nader, who represents a big consumer organization that never pays a nickel in taxes.

The most valuable function performed by the federal government is entertainment.

No matter what happens, somebody will find a way to take it too seriously.

"Don't Kid Yourself" would be the greatest brand name for birth control pills.

Parodies are hard to do well, as is shown by the mediocrity of so many recent attempts. No matter how ripe a genre is for satirizing, unless you know how to do it, there are no guarantees.

Once when somebody produced a newspaper in which there was a letter of stupid abuse of Sir Joshua Reynolds, of which Johnson himself came in for a share,––'Pray (said he), let us have it read aloud from beginning to end'; which being done, he with a ludicrous earnestness, and not directing his look to any particular person, called out, 'Are we alive after all this satire?

When the Lilliputians first saw Gulliver's watch, that "wonderful kind of engine...a globe, half silver and half of some transparent metal," they identified it immediately as the god he worshiped. After all, "he seldom did anything without consulting it: he called it his oracle, and said it pointed out the time for every action in his life." To Jonathan Swift in 1726 that was worth a bit of satire. Modernity was under way. We're all Gullivers now. Or are we Yahoos?

Ridicule is the unfortunate destiny of the ridiculous.

If there is a god, I think he has a sense of humour. He does not require human beings to protect him from satire.

The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.

The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself, but in so doing, he identifies himself with people – that is, people everywhere, not for the purpose of taking them apart, but simply revealing their true nature.

Yes, and look at the corpses. Place always reminds me of that old thing in Punch, you know—'Waiter, take away Lord Whatsisname, he's been dead two days.' Look at Old Ormsby there, snoring

That's better,' said Wimsey. 'Napoleon or somebody said that you could always turn a tragedy into a comedy by sittin' down.

I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.

Now to me, Edith looks like something that would eat her young.

Accursed from their birth they be Who seek to find monogamy, Pursuing it from bed to bed— I think they would be better dead.