Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind reception it meets with in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.

Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.

It is difficult not to write satire.

Good satire goes beyond the specific point it's trying to make and teaches you how to think critically.

Literality in satire is the condemnation by quotation.

Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.

Whether it makes us smile or irritates us, political satire encourages us to look inside ourselves and, more generally, at what is happening in society. [...] In any case, even an ungenerous and disrespectful attack is better than any kind of censorship. We can defend ourselves against the former, but not the latter.

Certainly Mr Eliot in the twenties was responsible for a great vogue for verse-satire. An ideal formula of ironic, gently "satiric", self-expression was provided by that master for the undergraduate underworld, tired and thirsty for poetic fame in a small way. The results of Mr Eliot are not Mr Eliot himself: but satire with him has been the painted smile of the clown. Habits of expression ensuing from mannerism are, as a fact, remote from the central function of satire. In its essence the purpose of satire — whether verse or prose — is aggression. (When whimsical, sentimental, or "poetic" it is a sort of bastard humour.) Satire has a great big glaring target. If successful, it blasts a great big hole in the center. Directness there must be and singleness of aim: it is all aim, all trajectory.

But satire, ever moral, ever new,
Delights the reader and instructs him, too.
She, if good sense refine her sterling page,
Oft shakes some rooted folly of the age.

A satirist is a man whose flesh creeps so at the ugly and the savage and the incongruous aspects of society that he has to express them as brutally and nakedly as possible to get relief.

In jest, there is truth.

There is no better way to box stupidity than to satirize it.

In the United States of America, satire is protected speech, even if the object of the satire doesn’t get it.

Satire to be good must be unfair and single-minded. To be backed by intense anger is good — though absolutely not necessary.