Jonathan Swift Quotes

If a man makes me keep my distance, the comfort is, he keeps his at the same time.

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

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.

Words are the clothing of our thoughts.

This made me reflect, how vain an attempt it is for a man to endeavor to do himself honor among those who are out of all degree of equality or comparison with him.

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

"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."

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.

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.

I replied that England (the dear place of my nativity) was computed to produce three times the quantity of food, more than its inhabitants are able to consume, ... But, in order to feed the luxury and intemperance of the males, and the vanity of the females, we sent away the greatest part of our necessary things to other countries, from whence in return we brought the materials of diseases, folly, and vice, to spend among ourselves. Hence it follows of necessity that vast numbers of our people are compelled to seek their livelihood by begging, robbing, stealing, cheating, pimping, forswearing, flattering, suborning, forging, gaming, lying, fawning, hectoring, voting, scribbling, freethinking,