Quotes About Jonathan Swift

Yet malice never was his aim;He lash'd the vice but spar'd the name.No individual could resent,Where thousands equally were meant.His satire points at no defectBut what all mortals may correct;For he abhorr'd that senseless tribeWho call it humor when they gibe.

Indeed, madam, your ladyship is very sparing of your tea: I protest, the last I took was no more than water bewitch'd.

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.

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.

The tiny Lilliputians surmise that Gulliver's watch may be his god, because it is that which, he admits, he seldom does anything without consulting.

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.

Jonathan Swift mounted a lifelong attempt to 'fix our language forever'—no critic and advocate of immutability has ever once managed properly or even marginally to outwit the English language's capacity for foxy and relentlessly slippery flexibility.

Jonathan Swift: 'We have enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.

Indeed, madam, your ladyship is very sparing of your tea: I protest, the last I took was no more than water bewitch'd.

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

Jonathan Swift made a soul for the gentlemen of this city by hating his neighbor as himself.

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.