Jonathan Swift Quotes

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

  Jonathan Swift

• Promises and pie-crust are made to be broken.

  Jonathan Swift

• Principally I hate and detest that animal called man; although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth.

  Jonathan Swift

• Positiveness is a good quality for preachers and speakers because, whoever shares his thoughts with the public will convince them as he himself appears convinced.

  Jonathan Swift

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

  Jonathan Swift

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

  Jonathan Swift

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

  Jonathan Swift

• Once kick the world, and the world and you will live together at a reasonably good understanding.

  Jonathan Swift

• Observation is an old man’s memory.

  Jonathan Swift

• Nothing is so great an example of bad manners as flattery. If you flatter all the company, you please none; If you flatter only one or two, you offend the rest.

  Jonathan Swift

• No wise man ever wished to be younger.

  Jonathan Swift

• No man was every so completely skilled in the conduct of life, as not to receive new information from age and experience.

  Jonathan Swift

  Topics in Age

• My nose itched, and I knew I should drink wine or kiss a fool.

  Jonathan Swift

• Most sorts of diversion in men, children and other animals, are in imitation of fighting.

  Jonathan Swift

• Men are happy to be laughed at for their humor, but not for their folly.

  Jonathan Swift

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

  Jonathan Swift

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

  Jonathan Swift

• 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.

  Jonathan Swift

• 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.

  Jonathan Swift

• If Heaven had looked upon riches to be a valuable thing, it would not have given them to such a scoundrel.

  Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift (125)

Birth:	30th November, 1667
Death:	19th October, 1745
Nationality:	Angolan, Irish
Profession:	Essayist, Poet, Politician, Satirist

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Deaths

• 1952 - Paul Eluard
• 1830 - Adam Weishaupt
• 1889 - William Allingham
• 1962 - Niels Bohr
• 1969 - Joseph P. Kennedy