662 Quotes by Jonathan Swift

We of this age have discovered a shorter, and more prudent method to become scholars and wits, without the fatigue of reading or of thinking.

For this kind of commodity will not bear exportation, the flesh being of too tender a consistence to admit a long continuance in salt, although perhaps I could name a country which would be glad to eat up our whole nation without it.

In answer to which, I assured his honor that in all points out of their [lawyers'] own trade, they were usually the most ignorant and stupid generation among us, the most despicable in common conversation, avowed enemies to all knowledge and learning; and equally disposed to pervert the general reason of mankind, in every other subject of discourse as in that of their own profession.

When a great genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign; that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."[Thoughts on Various Subjects]

As love without esteem is capricious and volatile; esteem without love is languid and cold.

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

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.

May you live every day of your life

...all disgracers of the press in prose and verse condemned to eat nothing but their own cotton, and quench their thirst with their own ink.