Quotes by Satirists - Page 24

History was a way to live extra lives, to cheat the limits of flesh and blood, to roll the rock back from the tomb and free the resurrected dead.
Tony Hendra
History was not simply a catalogue of the dead and buried and benighted, but rather a vast new world to be pioneered; ...if you approached the past generously, so to speak—its people as humans, not facts, as modern in their time as we were in ours, who thought and felt as we do, the dead would live again, our equals, not our old-fashioned, hopelessly unenlightened, and backward inferiors. Humanity, to be fully known, had to be seen as changeless as well as ever changing.
Tony Hendra
You see, dear—I think there are two types of people in the world. Those who divide the world up into two kinds of people... and those who don't.
Tony Hendra
The devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people worse than they are.
Karl Kraus
acquaintance, n.: A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.
Ambrose Bierce
Nothing holds back human progress as frequently as the misbelief that the words ‘impossible’ and ‘improbable’ are synonyms.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The middle class were invented to give the poor hope; the poor, to make the rich feel special; the rich, to humble the middle class.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Like alcohol and poverty, a heartbreak has the power to make a man do something he wouldn’t normally do and to make a woman do someone she wouldn’t normally do.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
To evade arrogance, remind yourself (from time to time) that your talent or success could have been better. To be thankful, remind yourself (every now and then) that your illness or failure could have been worse.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We love being mentally strong, but we hate situations that allow us to put our mental strength to good use.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Because of self-doubt, the fear of failure, or laziness, most people usually bite off way less than they can chew.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The continuation of man’s life is more attributable to his fear of death than it is to his desire to live. As a matter of fact, in countless cases, it is attributable to only the former.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Some people are still alive only because they find being dead more boring than being alive.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The boring thing with taking a walk with someone is that your thoughts are then dictated by the subject or subjects of your conversation and that is made worse by the fact that most sane people are terrified of silence whenever they are with or near someone.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Wealth seldom fails to breed the fear of poverty.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Even those who want to go to heaven would rather kill than be killed.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The only business of the historian is to relate things exactly as they are: this he can never do as long as he is afraid
Lucian of Samosata
Fear has no brains it is an idiot. The dismal witness that it bears and the cowardly counsel that it whispers are unrelated.
Ambrose Bierce
Plagiarism is the fear of a blank page.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We have glorified wealth and freedom so much that it is impossible for most of us to truly believe that a man can truly be happy in a shack or within the confines of a prison cell.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Most people do not mind having a house that is smaller and/or a car that is cheaper than their neighbours’, as long as they each earn and have more money than their neighbours, and, equally important, their neighbours know that.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Oh let me live my own! and die so too! ("To live and die is all I have to do:") Maintain a poet's dignity and ease, And see what friends, and read what books I please.
Alexander Pope
There is no mistaking a good book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Libraries can in general be too narrow or too wide for the soul.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
I knew books could see people around them, they ground their tiny teeth, tried to rattle like windows, stories to tell.
Steve Aylett
Until recently, I was an ebook sceptic, see; one of those people who harrumphs about the “physical pleasure of turning actual pages” and how ebook will “never replace the real thing”. Then I was given a Kindle as a present. That shut me up. Stock complaints about the inherent pleasure of ye olde format are bandied about whenever some new upstart invention comes along. Each moan is nothing more than a little foetus of nostalgia jerking in your gut. First they said CDs were no match for vinyl. Then they said MP3s were no match for CDs. Now they say streaming music services are no match for MP3s. They’re only happy looking in the rear-view mirror.
Charlie Brooker
Most books are so well written they barely have any effect on the reader’s senses
Steve Aylett
When a book and a head collide and a hollow sound is heard, must it always have come from the book?
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.
Samuel Butler
A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.
Samuel Butler
Books, the children of the brain.
Jonathan Swift
We think our fathers fools, so wise we grow. Our wiser sons, no doubt will think us so.
Alexander Pope
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
That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy.
Jonathan Swift
If after hearing my songs just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend or perhaps to strike a loved one it will all have been worth the while.
Tom Lehrer
Must be frustrating being a scientist. There you are, incrementally discovering how the universe works via a series of complex tests and experiments, for the benefit of all mankind - and what thanks do you get? People call you "egghead" or "boffin" or "heretic", and they cave your face in with a rock and bury you out in the wilderness. Not literally - not in this day and age - but you get the idea. Scientists are mistrusted by huge swathes of the general public, who see them as emotionless lab-coated meddlers-with-nature rather than, say, fellow human beings who've actually bothered getting off their arses to work this shit out.
Charlie Brooker
Order is heaven's first law.
Alexander Pope
Many people find bald, unvarnished truths so disturbing, they prefer to ram their heads in the sand and start dreaming at the first sign of scientific reality.
Charlie Brooker
Where the frontier of science once was is now the centre.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
It is still cheating, even if nobody comes.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Looking but not seeing is the hearing but not understanding of the eye.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We have truth in order not to die of art.
Steve Aylett
It's spider season. Every year, right about now, thousands of the godless eight-legged bastards emerge from the bowels of hell (or the garden, whichever's nearest) with the sole intention of tormenting humankind.
Charlie Brooker
We think our fathers fools, so wise we grow. Our wiser sons, no doubt will think us so.
Alexander Pope
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
That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy.
Jonathan Swift
If after hearing my songs just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend or perhaps to strike a loved one it will all have been worth the while.
Tom Lehrer
Must be frustrating being a scientist. There you are, incrementally discovering how the universe works via a series of complex tests and experiments, for the benefit of all mankind - and what thanks do you get? People call you "egghead" or "boffin" or "heretic", and they cave your face in with a rock and bury you out in the wilderness. Not literally - not in this day and age - but you get the idea. Scientists are mistrusted by huge swathes of the general public, who see them as emotionless lab-coated meddlers-with-nature rather than, say, fellow human beings who've actually bothered getting off their arses to work this shit out.
Charlie Brooker
Order is heaven's first law.
Alexander Pope
Many people find bald, unvarnished truths so disturbing, they prefer to ram their heads in the sand and start dreaming at the first sign of scientific reality.
Charlie Brooker
Where the frontier of science once was is now the centre.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
It is still cheating, even if nobody comes.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Looking but not seeing is the hearing but not understanding of the eye.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We have truth in order not to die of art.
Steve Aylett
It's spider season. Every year, right about now, thousands of the godless eight-legged bastards emerge from the bowels of hell (or the garden, whichever's nearest) with the sole intention of tormenting humankind.
Charlie Brooker
The tiny Lilliputians surmise that Gulliver's watch may be his god, because it is that which, he admits, he seldom does anything without consulting.
Jonathan Swift
For he lives twice who can at once employ,The present well, and e’en the past enjoy.
Alexander Pope
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
12% of people marry because they are completely in love. 88% of people marry just so they are then liable for only half of their rent.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana