Satirist Quotes

Rhetoric in serious discourses is like the flowers in corn; pleasing to those who come only for amusement, but prejudicial to him who would reap profit from it.

Hail, follow, well met, All dirty and wet: Find out, if you can, Who's master, who's man.

No man of honor ever quite lives up to his code, any more than a moral man manages to avoid sin.

Politics, as hopeful men practise it in the world, consists mainly of the delusion that a change in form is a change in substance.

To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason

Just get the right syllable in the proper place.

I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.

There is no record in the history of a nation that ever gained anything valuable by being unable to defend itself.

I forget whether advice be among the lost things which Ariosto says are to be found in the moon: that and time ought to have been there.

All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.

There's none so blind as they that won't see.

The best teacher of children, in brief, is one who is essentially childlike.

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

[T]here is only one sound argument for democracy, and that is the argument that it is a crime for any man to hold himself out as better than other men, and, above all, a most heinous offense for him to prove it.

It is only doubt that creates. It is only the minority that counts.

If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.

A fig for your bill of fare; show me your bill of company.

Women have a hard enough time in this world: telling them the truth would be too cruel.

The real charm of the United States is that it is the only comic country ever heard of.

A man's women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity. His most gaudy sayings and doings seldom deceive them; they see the actual man within, and know him for a shallow and pathetic fellow. In this fact, perhaps, lies one of the best proofs of feminine intelligence, or, as the common phrase makes it, feminine intuition.

It is a maxim, that those, to whom everybody allows the second place, have an undoubted title to the first.

The common notion that free speech prevails in the United States always makes me laugh.

[Government] is apprehended, not as a committee of citizens chosen to carry on the communal business of the whole population, but as a separate and autonomous corporation, mainly devoted to exploiting the population for the benefit of its own members.

Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.

A woman usually respects her father, but her view of her husband is mingled with contempt, for she is of course privy to the transparent devices by which she snared him.

The motives of the best actions will not bear too strict an inquiry. It is allowed that the cause of most actions, good or bad, may be resolved into the love of ourselves; but the self-love of some men inclines them to please others, and the self-love of others is wholly employed in pleasing themselves. This makes the great distinction between virtue and vice.

A carpenter is known by his chips.

When a woman says she won't, it's a good sign that she will. And when she says she will, it is an even better sign.

Our whole practical government is grounded in mob psychology and the Boobus Americanus will follow any command that promises to make him safer.

Everyone desires long life, not one old age.

Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.

Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again.

It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen; it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly.

Nothing is so great an instance of ill-manners as flattery.

For it is an absurdity to call a country civilized in which a decent and industrious man, laboriously mastering a trade which is valuble and necessary to the common weal, has no assurance that it will sustain him while he stands ready to practice it, or keep him out of the poorhouse when illness or age makes him idle.

A free citizen in a free state, it seems to me, has an inalienable right to play with whomsoever he will, so long as he does not disturb the general peace. If any other citizen, offended by the spectacle, makes a pother, then that other citizen, and not the man exercising his inalienable right, should be put down by the police.

There are few wild beasts more to be dreaded than a talking man having nothing to say.

My horses understand me tolerably well; I converse with them at least four hours every day. They are strangers to bridle or saddle; they live in great amity with me, and friendship of each other.

We have an intuitive sense of our duty.

All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him.

Philosophy, as the modern world knows it, is only intellectual club-swinging.

Life is a dead-end street.

A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.

Men always try to make virtues of their weaknesses. Fear of death and fear of life both become piety.

The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flop-houses and disturbing the peace.

It is surely no mere coincidence that the land of the emancipated and enthroned woman is also the land of canned soup, of canned pork and beans, of whole meals in cans, and of everything else ready made.

A traveler's chief aim should be to make men wiser and better, and to improve their minds by the bad-as well as good example of what they deliver concerning foreign places.

Possession, they say, is eleven points of the law.

Justice is what you get when you run out of money.

I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs.

And, is not Virtue in MankindThe Nutriment that feeds the Mind?

The way for newspapers to meet the competition of radio and television is simply to get out better papers.

To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgment.

One of the things that makes a Negro unpleasant to white folk is the fact that he suffers from their injustice. He is thus a standing rebuke to them.

Who ever heard, indeed, of an autobiography that was not (interesting)? I can recall none in all the literature of the world

The cosmos is a gigantic flywheel making 10,000 revolutions per minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it.

A home is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live in it.

What ass first let loose the doctrine that the suffrage is a high boon and voting a noble privilege?

I love good creditable acquaintance; I love to be the worst of the company.

I have heard of a man who had a mind to sell his house, and therefore carried a piece of brick in his pocket, which he shewed as a pattern to encourage purchasers.