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Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired: for in the course of things, men always grow vicious before they become unbelievers; but if you would once convince the town or country profligate, by topics drawn from the view of their own quiet, reputation, health, and advantage, their infidelity would soon drop off: This I confess is no easy task, because it is almost in a literal sense, to fight with beasts.

— Jonathan Swift

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Mind

More quotes by Jonathan Swift

Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.

Proper words in proper places, make the true definition of a style.

I said the thing which was not. (For they have no word in their language to express lying or falsehood.)

Gulliver's Travels (1726)

He made it a part of his religion never to say grace to his meat.

A Tale of a Tub (1704)

A wise man is never less alone than when he is alone.

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The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

H. P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

Kenneth Boulding to Kenneth Boulding in: United States. Congress. House (1973)

The greater part of humanity is too much harassed and fatigued by the struggle with want, to rally itself for a new and sterner struggle with error.

Friedrich Schiller On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794)

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

George Bernard Shaw Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Jonathan Swift (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.