Quotes by Satirists - Page 21

To do great work one must be very idle as well as very industrious.
Samuel Butler
The employed are punished by having to do what they do not love. The self-employed are punished by the opposite.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
There is more to life than making a living. Do not work more than you live.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Man is an extremely complex creature: he usually acts in an unselfish manner for selfish reasons.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Probably no invention came more easily to man than Heaven.
Georg Cristoph Lichtenberg
Of course, with any new technology, the question in the back of everyone's mind is 'Can I have sex with it or use it to kill people?'-Flintstones Vol. 2: Bedrock Bedlam
Mark Russell
[Pascal] was the first and perhaps is still the most effective voice to be raised in warning of the consequences of the enthronement of the human ego in contradistinction to the cross, symbolizing the ego's immolation. How beautiful it all seemed at the time of the Enlightenment, that man triumphant would bring to pass that earthly paradise whose groves of academe would ensure the realization forever of peace, plenty, and beatitude in practice. But what a nightmare of wars, famines, and folly was to result therefrom.
Malcolm Muggeridge
If a man makes me keep my distance, the comfort is, he keeps his at the same time.
Jonathan Swift
Inhumanity, n. One of the signal and characteristic qualities of humanity.
Ambrose Bierce
To err is human, to forgive, divine.
Alexander Pope
With Zia's controversial demise in 1988, Jinnah was finally spared the false beard Zia kept pinning on the founder's otherwise clean-shaven face.
Nadeem Farooq Paracha
It has been said that although God cannot alter the past, historians can --it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence.
Samuel Butler
God alone knows the future, but only an historian can alter the past.
Ambrose Bierce
History – An account mostly false, of events unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.
Ambrose Bierce
It has been said that although God cannot alter the past, historians can --it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence.
Samuel Butler
God alone knows the future, but only an historian can alter the past.
Ambrose Bierce
History – An account mostly false, of events unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.
Ambrose Bierce
Genius is independent of situation.
Charles Churchill
The only way to know God, the only way to know the other, is to listen. Listening is reaching out into that unknown other self, surmounting your walls and theirs; listening is the beginning of understanding, the first exercise of
Tony Hendra
If e-book readers were invented before print books, (petty things such as) the smell of ink would have been some people’s only reason for not abandoning e-books.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We sometimes reveal how ignorant or bored we were when we read a book by giving it 5-stars.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Some artists benefit less from being interviewed than they do from being left alone.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
From space this Earth is incandescent with abominations - the gods write their signature in our entrails
Steve Aylett
An artist that makes art merely to meet a demand is a slave to what his patrons wants to see, or, hear.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The only honest art form is laughter, comedy. You can't fake it...try to fake three laughs in an hour -- ha ha ha ha ha -- they'll take you away, man. You can't.
Lenny Bruce
We hold that happenings which may even compel the heart to break cannot break the human spirit, or rob it of its most essential qualities.
May Kendall
Past humanity is not only implicit in each new man born but is contained in him. Humanity is an ever-widening spiral and life is the beam that plays briefly on each succeeding ring. All humanity from its beginning to its end is already present but the beam has not yet played beyond you.
Flann O'Brien
One of the reasons God did not make a lover for Himself when He made one for Adam is because He knew that fewer people would take Him seriously once He had an ex.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
It was a music of the spirit, seeking peace, not emotional release, expressing the hunger of the soul rather than the heart. A way of sequencing notes so ancient it might be music's mother lode, its Fertile Crescent. It wouldn't have grated, I felt, on the ears of ancient Greeks or Egyptians or Mesopotamians or Sumerians—or even on the august auditory equipment of the Buddha or Lao-tzu.
Tony Hendra
The Offices rerooted me in a tradition where, monk or not, I would always be at home. From long ago I knew the power of their repetition, the incantatory force of the Psalms. But they had an added power now. As a kid, the psalmist (or psalmists) had seemed remote to me, the Psalms long prayers which sometimes rose to great poetry but often had simply to be endured. For a middle-aged man, the psalmists' moods and feelings came alive. One of the voices sounded a lot like a modern New Yorker, me or people I knew: a manic-depressive type A personality sometimes up, more often down, sometimes resigned, more often pissed off, railing about his sneaky enemies and feckless friends, always bitching to the Lord about the rotten hand he'd been dealt. That good old changelessness.
Tony Hendra
It sounds to me, dear, as if your satirist is a bit like a monk. They both take a rather dim view of the world, and both try to do something abou
Tony Hendra
Feelings trap us in the self, Tony dear. Doing a thing because you feel wonderful about it—even a work of charity—is in the end a selfish act. We perform the work not to feel wonderful but to know and love the other. It's the same with your romance. You may not feel your love, but God is still your loved one, your other.
Tony Hendra
Like the rest of Holy Week, Easter is also a terrific story. It starts as tragedy: the hero broken and bloody, against all expectation dead, his followers' joyful hope in him entombed with his corpse, the rock rolled into place, sealing their despair.But the curtain doesn't fall there. The next morning at dawn they discover the rock has been rolled back. The tomb is empty, the body's gone! A missing corpse? Great stuff. A whisper of comedy. Now a touch of farce as Mary Magdalen and the guys chase frantically around looking for help, or the corpse, when suddenly, out of nowhere, up it pops—alive!Of course it's Jesus, who's done the impossible and beaten death.And they're so amazed they think he's the gardener! It's a payoff way beyond the Hollywood ending: all the flooding emotion and uplift of a tragedy followed by all the bubbling joy and optimism of a comedy.Is that possible? Not just to live happily ever after but to die—and still live happily ever after? It's the most audacious claim of Christianity, the one element that marks the brand indelibly, that trumps the claims of all other major faiths.
Tony Hendra
Christianity . . . sees the necessity for man to have spiritual values and it shows him how to get at those through physical sacraments.
Malcolm Muggeridge
If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.
Lenny Bruce
What then remains, but well our power to use,And keep good humour still whate’er we lose?And trust me, dear, good humour can prevail,When airs, and flights, and screams, and scolding fail.Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll;Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul
Alexander Pope
Sexual starvation forces a heterosexual man to see beauty in every single female who he can sleep with without his society’s disapproval.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Looks sure can be deceiving: not every ‘ugly’ person is a ‘bad’ person (or is guilty of whatever it is that they are accused of).
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
BELLADONNA, n. In Italian a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues.
Ambrose Bierce
A woman who cannot be ugly is not beautiful.
Karl Kraus
The only way to truly help most drug addicts and most alcoholics is to—instead of them—change reality.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
People are always changing themselves and their world, dear. Very few of the changes are new. We rather confuse change and newness, I think. What is truly new never changes.""You speak in riddles, aged progenitor.""The world worships a certain kind of newness. People are always talking about a new car, or a new drink or p-p-play or house, but these things are not truly new, are they? They begin to get old the minute you acquire them. New is not in things. New is within us. The truly new is something that is new forever: you. Every morning of your life and every evening, every moment is new. You have never lived this moment before and you never will again. In this sense the new is also the eternal.
Tony Hendra
People who complain about something that they cannot do anything about are as irritating as those who complain about something that they can do something about.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Most sexually adventurous women want a man who regards cunnilingus as a basic woman right.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Some women would not cheat, and some would not have cheated, had they each married a man whom they love … or at least like.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
In a patriarchal society, one of the most important functions of the institution of the family is to make feel like a somebody whenever he is in his own yard a man who is a nobody whenever he is in his employer’s yard.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Men, some to business take, some to pleasure take; but every woman is at heart a rake
Alexander Pope
You are not permitted to kill a woman who has wronged you, but nothing forbids you to reflect that she is growing older every minute.
Ambrose Bierce
GRAPESHOT, n. An argument which the future is preparing in answer to the demands of American Socialism.
Ambrose Bierce
He likewise directed, “that every senator in the great council of a nation, after he had delivered his opinion, and argued in the defence of it, should be obliged to give his vote directly contrary; because if that were done, the result would infallibly terminate in the good of the public.
Jonathan Swift
I would give something to know for precisely whom the deeds were really done, of which it is publicly stated they were done 'for the Fatherland'.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
One of the benefits of aligning yourself with an indistinct cluster of people is that claiming to feel their pain is often enough.
Charlie Brooker
Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature.
Samuel Butler
POLITICS, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
Ambrose Bierce
Why is there never a headline that says "Government program ends as its intended goal has been achieved"?
Oleg Atbashian
AMNESTY, n. The state's magnanimity to those offenders whom it would be too expensive to punish.
Ambrose Bierce
diplomacy, n.: The patriotic art of lying for one's country.
Ambrose Bierce
And he gave it for his opinion, "that whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.
Jonathan Swift
It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.
Jonathan Swift
The real purpose of the opposition is to minimize the amount of money the ruling party will have stolen from the people at the end of its term.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana