“Satiety is a neighbor to continued pleasures.”

An evil-speaker differs from an evil-doer only in the want of opportunity.

A great part of art consists in imitation. For the whole conduct of life is based on this: that what we admire in others we want to do ourselves.

Without natural gifts technical rules are useless.

A laugh costs too much when bought at the expense of virtue.

When we cannot hope to win, it is an advantage to yield.

It is much easier to try one’s hand at many things than to concentrate one’s powers on one thing.

The learned understand the reason of art; the unlearned feel the pleasure.

Write quickly and you will never write well; write well, and you will soon write quickly.

Sayings designed to raise a laugh are generally untrue and never complimentary. Laughter is never far removed from derision.

To swear, except when necessary, is becoming to an honorable man.

Give bread to a stranger, in the name of the universal brotherhood which binds together all men under the common father of nature.

If you direct your whole thought to work itself, none of the things which invade eyes or ears will reach the mind.

One should aim not at being possible to understand, but at being impossible to misunderstand.

While we ponder when to begin, it becomes too late to do.

From writing rapidly it does not result that one writes well, but from writing well it results that one writes rapidly.

We should not speak so that it is possible for the audience to understand us, but so that it is impossible for them to misunderstand us.

We’re never going to be the ultimate-insider look. You can do 50 insider looks at this Hollywood business, and the satire didn’t intrigue me. I think others can do that.

Satire is, more than those he brands, to blame; He hides behind a magisterial air He own offences, and strips others’ bare.

Most of my contemporaries at school entered the World of Business, the logical destiny of bores.

satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.

The most brilliant satire of all time was ‘A Modest Proposal’ by Jonathan Swift. You’ll notice how everything got straightened out in Ireland within days of that coming out.

I think if journalists start doing that then they won’t be practicing journalism. If satirists start doing that then they won’t be practicing satire.

Satire is a kind of poetry in which human vices are reprehended.

Satire among the Romans, but not among the Greeks, was a bitter invective poem.