Satire Quotes

1. "Now, as I understand it, the bards were feared. They were respected, but more than that they were feared. If you were just some magician, if you'd pissed off some witch, then what's she gonna do, she's gonna put a curse on you, and what's gonna happen? Your hens are gonna lay funny, your milk's gonna go sour, maybe one of your kids is gonna get a hare-lip or something like that — no big deal. You piss off a bard, and forget about putting a curse on you, he might put a satire on you. And if he was a skilful bard, he puts a satire on you, it destroys you in the eyes of your community, it shows you up as ridiculous, lame, pathetic, worthless, in the eyes of your community, in the eyes of your family, in the eyes of your children, in the eyes of yourself, and if it's a particularly good bard, and he's written a particularly good satire, then three hundred years after you're dead, people are still gonna be laughing, at what a twat you were."
Author: Alan Moore

2. "The Wit of Cheats, the Courage of a Whore,Are what ten thousand envy and adore:All, all look up, with reverential Awe,At crimes that 'scape, or triumph o'er the Law:While Truth, Worth, Wisdom, daily they decry-`'Nothing is sacred now but Villainy'- Epilogue to the Satires, Dialogue I"
Author: Alexander Pope

3. "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,"
Author: Alexander Pope

4. "You can't make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you're doing is recording it."
Author: Art Buchwald

5. "THE greatest of English dramatists except Shakespeare, the first literary dictator and poet-laureate, a writer of verse, prose, satire, and criticism who most potently of all the men of his time affected the subsequent course of English letters: such was Ben Jonson, and as such his strong personality assumes an interest to us almost unparalleled, at least in his age. Ben Jonson came of the stock that was centuries after to give to the world Thomas Carlyle; for Jonson's grandfather was of Annandale, over the Solway, whence he"
Author: Ben Jonson

6. "The Irish and British, they love satire, it's a large part of the culture."
Author: Ben Nicholson

7. "Satire is fascinating stuff. It's deadly serious, and when politics begin to break down, there is a drift towards satire, because it's the only thing that makes any sense."
Author: Ben Nicholson

8. "Good satire comes from anger. It comes from a sense of injustice, that there are wrongs in the world that need to be fixed. And what better place to get that well of venom and outrage boiling than a newsroom, because you're on the front lines."
Author: Carl Hiaasen

9. "Conventional show-biz savvy held that Americans hated to be the objects of satire."
Author: Carroll O'Connor

10. "La Théologie.Qu'est-ce que la chute ?Si c'est l'unité devenue dualité, c'est Dieu qui a chuté.Au moins aurait-il pu deviner dans cette localisation unemalice ou une satire de la providence contre l'amour, et, dans lemode de la génération, un signe du péché originel. De fait, nousne pouvons faire l'amour qu'avec des organes excrémentiels.En d'autres termes, la création ne serait-elle pas la chute deDieu ?"
Author: Charles Baudelaire

11. "A sitcom isn't usually the right tool for satire."
Author: Chris Morris

12. "It is hard for power to enjoy or incorporate humour and satire in its system of control."
Author: Dario Fo

13. "Culturally, I have always been part of the proletariat. I lived side by side with the sons of glassblowers, fishermen and smugglers. The stories they told were shaper satires about the hypocrisy of authority and the middle classes, the two-facedness of teachers and lawyers and politicians. I was born politicized."
Author: Dario Fo

14. "Satire is people as they are; romanticism, people as they would like to be; realism, people as they seem with their insides left out."
Author: Dawn Powell

15. "Satire's nature is to be one-sided, contemptuous of ambiguity, and so unfairly selective as to find in the purity of ridicule an inarguable moral truth."
Author: E.L. Doctorow

16. "I like to write a lot of satire."
Author: Earl King

17. "Satire is enjoyable compensation for being forced to think."
Author: Edgar Johnson

18. "Satire is the antidote to Pollyanna and Dr. Pangloss. It focuses our gaze sharply upon the the contrast between things as they are and as they should be."
Author: Edgar Johnson

19. "So are you turning out like them? Do you still write and draw?""yeah, but I don't do anything personnal or profound. My parents take life way to seriousely. I lke to make people laugh. I had a regular cartoon feature in the school news paper and created some for the year book. Social satire stuff. I've done a couple of political cartoons for wisteria's paper and just got one accepted in Easton's, which has a much bigger circulation. Impressed?"
Author: Elizabeth Chandler

20. "Satire may be mad and anarchic, but it presupposes an admitted superiority in certain things over others; it presupposes a standard."
Author: G.K. Chesterton

21. "Fools are my theme, let satire be my song."
Author: George Gordon Byron

22. "You are 'the best of cut-throats:'--do not start;The phrase is Shakespeare's, and not misapplied:--War's a brain-spattering, windpipe-slitting art,Unless her cause by Right be sanctified.If you have acted once a generous part,The World, not the World's masters, will decide,And I shall be delighted to learn who,Save you and yours, have gained by Waterloo?I am no flatterer--you've supped full of flattery:They say you like it too--'tis no great wonder:He whose whole life has been assault and battery,At last may get a little tired of thunder;And swallowing eulogy much more than satire, heMay like being praised for every lucky blunder;Called 'Saviour of the Nations'--not yet saved,And Europe's Liberator--still enslaved.I've done. Now go and dine from off the platePresented by the Prince of the Brazils,And send the sentinel before your gateA slice or two from your luxurious meals:He fought, but has not fed so well of late..."
Author: George Gordon Byron

23. "If the mystery can be reduced to one solution, it lies in a simple coincidence: Rimbaud's interest in his own work had survived the realization that the world would not be changed by verbal innovation. It did not survive the failure of all his adult relationships. He had always treated poems as a form of private communication. He gave his songs to chansonniers, his satires to satirists. Without a constant companion, he was writing in a void."
Author: Graham Robb

24. "Satire of satire tends to be self-canceling, and deliberate shock tactics soon lose their ability to shock, especially when they're too deliberate."
Author: Herb Caen

25. "Ambicije i tu truju ljudima zivote i medjusobne odnose, mrznje tinjaju godinama,velike ljubavi nicu neocekivano i gase se sporo i zalosno.Ukratko, tu ima pomalo od svega sto inace medju ljudima biva i sto ih povezuje ili deli, podize ili satire."
Author: Ivo Andric

26. "When the Lilliputians first saw Gulliver's watch, that "wonderful kind of engine...a globe, half silver and half of some transparent metal," they identified it immediately as the god he worshiped. After all, "he seldom did anything without consulting it: he called it his oracle, and said it pointed out the time for every action in his life." To Jonathan Swift in 1726 that was worth a bit of satire. Modernity was under way. We're all Gullivers now. Or are we Yahoos?"
Author: James Gleick

27. "Comedy has to be done en clair. You can't blunt the edge of wit or the point of satire with obscurity. Try to imagine a famous witty saying that is not immediately clear."
Author: James Thurber

28. "But in terms of satire and comedy, our biggest and earliest influence was Mad magazine."
Author: Jerry Zucker

29. "If you're going to get into social criticism with absurdity and satire, you can't be politically correct when you do that."
Author: John Cusack

30. "It is difficult not to write satire."
Author: Juvenal

31. "The modern form of things had begun to appeal to me, also (as material for satire) politics, and the lives of the great and little, high up in the social scale."
Author: Laurence Housman

32. "Satire is focused bitterness."
Author: Leo Rosten

33. "It is, after all, far too easy to pinch and kick the bizarre Mormon Church; to say it's ripe for satire and parody is to say a Catholic schoolgirl is ripe for debauchery. It's like shooting polygamist fish in a barrel of coffee."
Author: Mark Morford

34. "How do we get a pantomime cow on set. Jeez, the rigours of satire."
Author: Mel Smith

35. "The purpose of satire has been rightly stated as to strip off the veneer of comforting illusion and cosy half truth, and our job, as I see it, is to put it back again!"
Author: Michael Flanders

36. "Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful."
Author: Molly Ivins

37. "I would play hooky from school and spend all day in the movie theaters. Consequently, I learned satire in all its subtle forms."
Author: Nile Rodgers

38. "How much truth is contained in something can be best determined by making it thoroughly laughable and then watching to see how much joking around it can take. For truth is a matter that can withstand mockery, that is freshened by any ironic gesture directed at it. Whatever cannot withstand satire is false."
Author: Peter Sloterdijk

39. "The show is a satire, which gives us freedom to do anything we want. Satire is the magic word that wipes away any culpability. The media is jealous of this freedom."
Author: Rob Corddry

40. "Nothing is new anymore. We're living in a post-everything society and "art" itself has become satire."
Author: Ruadhán J. McElroy

41. "He was learning that to win a fight like this, it was not enough to know what one was fighting against. That was easy. He was fighting against the view that people could be killed for their ideas, and against the ability of any religion to place a limiting point on thought. But he needed, now, to be clear of what he was fighting for. Freedom of speech, freedom of the imagination, freedom from fear, and the beautiful, ancient art of which he was privileged to be a practitioner. Also skepticism, irreverence, doubt, satire, comedy, and unholy glee. He would never again flinch from the defense of these things. p. 285"
Author: Salman Rushdie

42. "We pay homage to the people who came before, doing satires, like Mel Brooks; we're just carrying the torch."
Author: Shawn Wayans

43. "It is a frightful satire and an epigram on the modern age that the only use it knows for solitude is to make it a punishment, a jail sentence."
Author: Søren Kierkegaard

44. "I'm a satirist, so I've got boxing gloves on if the person is worthy of satire. But I'm not an assassin."
Author: Stephen Colbert

45. "Well, these sad and hopeless obstacles are welcome in one sense, for they enable us to look with indifference upon the cruel satires that Fate loves to indulge in."
Author: Thomas Hardy

46. "I wrote my first play as extra credit for my fourth grade English class. 'Can Helen Stop Smoking' was a satire on the ill effects of cigarette smoking. My friend Vicki Haugabrook played as Helen and I directed the show. At the time, my brother Vince was leading the campaign to get our grandmother to quit."
Author: T'Keyah Crystal Keymah

47. "The real issues I don't think most people touch. The Clinton jokes are all about Monica Lewinsky and all that stuff and not about the important things, like the fact that he wouldn't ban landmines...I'm not tempted to write a song about George W. Bush. I couldn't figure out what sort of song I would write. That's the problem: I don't want to satirize George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporize them. And that's not funny....OK, well, if I say that, I might get a shock laugh, but it's not really satire."
Author: Tom Lehrer

48. "The hidden and awful Wisdom which apportions the destinies of mankind is pleased so to humiliate and cast down the tender, good, and wise; and to set up the selfish, the foolish, or the wicked. Oh, be humble, my brother, in your prosperity! Be gentle with those who are less lucky, if not more deserving. Think, what right have you to be scornful, whose virtue is a deficiency of temptation, whose success may be a chance, whose rank may be an ancestor's accident, whose prosperity is very likely a satire."
Author: William Makepeace Thackeray

49. "Hollywood is horrible... it's beyond satire."
Author: Yahoo Serious

50. "I believe that pop culture is just, like, so ready for 'Watchmen.' We tried so hard to ride that wave between satire and reality, and all the things that make you still care about the character, but you don't miss the commentary about them."
Author: Zack Snyder

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