662 Quotes by Jonathan Swift

Rebukes are easy from our betters, From men of quality and letters; But when low dunces will affront, What man alive can stand the brunt?

Great abilities, when employed as God directs, do but make the owners of them greater and more painful servants to their neighbors.

Pretense is the overrating of any kind of knowledge we pretend to.

Your notions of friendship are new to me; I believe every man is born with his quantum, and he cannot give to one without robbing another. I very well know to whom I would give the first place in my friendship, but they are not in the way, I am condemned to another scene, and therefore I distribute it in pennyworths to those about me, and who displease me least, and should do the same to my fellow prisoners if I were condemned to a jail.

When any one person or body of men seize into their hands the power in the last resort, there is properly no longer a government, but what Aristotle and his followers call the abuse and corruption of one.

Proper words in proper places make the true definiton of style.

Dignity, high station, or great riches, are in some sort necessary to old men, in order to keep the younger at a distance, who are otherwise too apt to insult them upon the score of their age.

It may pass for a maxim in State, that the administration cannot be placed in too few hands, nor the legislature in too many.

Proper words in proper places make the true definition of style.