Quotes by Satirists - Page 12

Prayers are to men as dolls are to children.
Samuel Butler
Unless they are off duty, no matter how wide it is, and even when it is sincere, a smile seems fake if the job description of the person who is smiling includes smiling.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Let Sporus tremble — "What? that thing of silk, Sporus, that mere white curd of ass's milk?Satire or sense, alas! can Sporus feel?Who breaks a Butterfly upon a Wheel?"Yet let me flap this Bug with gilded wings,This painted Child of Dirt that stinks and stings; Whose Buzz the Witty and the Fair annoys,Yet Wit ne'er tastes, and Beauty ne'er enjoys,
Alexander Pope
The devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people worse than they are.
Karl Kraus
Because he has finally realized that it is it and not him that is loved by the woman he loves, many a man is jealous of his own car, house, wardrobe, or salary.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.
Stanisław Jerzy Lec
There St. John mingles with my friendly bowl The feat of reason and the flow of soul.
Alexander Pope
A slave that acknowledges its enslavement is halfway to its liberation.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
If matters go badly now they will not always be so.
Horace
Anger is momentary madness so control your passion or it will control you.
Horace
Leave off asking what tomorrow will bring, andwhatever days fortune will give, count themas profit.
Horace
Life is an activity with which we kill time while we wait for something, someone, or the mere passage of time to kill us.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
To know what should be going on in a household: spend a few minutes with the wife, or, the husband. To know what’s really going on: spend a few minutes with their kid(s).
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We should pray for a sane mind in a sound body.
Juvenal
Prejudices are so to speak the mechanical instincts of men: through their prejudices they do without any effort many things they would find too difficult to think through to the point of resolving to do them.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
My thoughts by night are often filled With visions false as fair: For in the past alone I build My castles in the air.
Thomas Love Peacock
I never knew any man in my life who could not bear another's misfortunes perfectly like a Christian.
Alexander Pope
The vanity of human life is like a river constantly passing away and yet constantly coming on.
Alexander Pope
Everybody is talking about the Law of Attraction. Nobody is talking about the Law of Action.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
You mean that because I have no name I cannot die and that you cannot be held answerable for death even if you kill me?""That is about the size of it," said the Sergeant.I felt so sad and so entirely disappointed that tears came into my eyes and a lump of incommunicable poignancy swelled tragically in my throat. I began to feel intensely every fragment of my equal humanity. The life that was bubbling at the end of my fingers was real and nearly painful in intensity and so was the beauty of my warm face and the loose humanity of my limbs and the racy health of my red rich blood. To leave it all without good reason and to smash the little empire into small fragments was a thing too pitiful even to refuse to think about.
Flann O'Brien
Investigating Koreiko's case might take a long time," said Ostap. "God only knows how long. And since there is no God, nobody knows. We are in a terrible bind.
Ilya Ilf
To a man who was required to marry before he was allowed to have sex with his lover, marriage is a ‘righteous’ form of prostitution.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A first-rate story is easily killed by second-rate design.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
You can do very little with faith but you can do nothing without it.
Samuel Butler
To gain height, lose all your tall friends.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Some people’s self-esteem was secretly improved when they discovered that their then-lovers had killed themselves over them.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
All animals except man know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.
Samuel Butler
When you jump for joy, beware that no one moves the ground from beneath your feet.
Stanisław Jerzy Lec
One of life's sorest tragedies is that the people who brim with confidence are always the wrong people.
Charlie Brooker
Civilization transformed man from a food gatherer to a gatherer of pieces of paper: diplomas, employment contracts, money, etc.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Satire is tragedy plus time. You give it enough time, the public, the reviewers will allow you to satirize it. Which is rather ridiculous, when you think about it.
Lenny Bruce
Most of the very few people who would choose a good heart over riches would eventually use that to either make a lot of money, or attract men or women who are rich.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
88% of what we call good songs aren’t really good. They merely remind us of a good time we once had.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Back then, work revolved around life. Today, life revolves around work.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Know then thyself presume not God to scan: The proper study of mankind is man.
Alexander Pope
To a man with an internet connection, every thought and every movement sounds like a tweet or status update.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Epitaph n: an inscription on a tomb showing that virtues acquired by death have a retroactive effect.
Ambrose Bierce
Man is an extremely complex creature: he usually acts in an unselfish manner for selfish reasons.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
POLITICS, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
Ambrose Bierce
a story is ready when it falls from your face
Steve Aylett
Life is a process during which one initially gets less and less dependent, independent, and then more and more dependent.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Bread is the staff of life.
Jonathan Swift
Technology has transformed the world into a global village. And communities, families, friends, etc., into local islands.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Distinctive facial features of a parent are poor people’s paternity test.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Employment is the exploitation of the employer’s courage, and, the employed’s fear of failure.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Some mistakes are worse than others: wearing your underwear inside out isn’t as uncomfortable as wearing it back to front.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
When a dreamer loses his lover, his dream profits. (Unless, of course, the lover was the dreamer's dream.)
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Poverty does not always prevent a rich person from dating someone who is poor, unless the man is the one who is poor.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
An arrogant man whose arrogance we see from his own behaviour is more tolerable than a humble man whose humility we hear of from his own mouth.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Life occasionally humbles us by making us turned on by someone whom we turn off.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Some people hate people who are overconfident, only because their overconfidence reminds them of their underconfidence.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Some social ills are preserved by the common misbelief that things such as ignorance, greed, and stupidity do not have the stamina required to reach old age.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Stab me if you can enjoy it - but not if it feels like a duty. Stab me vertically if I’m lying down and horizontally if I’m running
Steve Aylett
In a war of ideas it is people who get killed.
Stanisław Jerzy Lec
12% of employees eat because they are hungry. 88% of employees eat because it is 1 o’clock.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
It is in the uncompromisingness with which dogma is held and not in the dogma or want of dogma that the danger lies.
Samuel Butler
Primary purposes of a mirror: (1) To help civilized men realize their imperfections, and, (2) To help the imperfect hide their imperfections.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Only a stomach that rarely feels hungry scorns common things.
Horace
Faults are soon copied.
Horace
Man, n. An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably out to be. His chief occupation is the extermination of other animals and his own species, which, however, multiplies with such insistent rapidity as to infest the whole habitable earth and Canada.
Ambrose Bierce