Satire quotes
-
Praise undeserved, is satire in disguise.
-- Alexander Pope -
Satire or sense, alas! Can Sporus feel? Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?
-- Alexander Pope -
Satire is dependent on strong beliefs, and on strong beliefs wounded.
-- Anita Brookner -
satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.
-- Barbara Tuchman -
-
The Irish and British, they love satire, its a large part of the culture.
-- Ben Nicholson -
Satire is an abuse of wit. It corrects few evils.
-- Christian Nestell Bovee -
It is hard for power to enjoy or incorporate humour and satire in its system of control.
-- Dario Fo -
Social satire has been around since people have been around.
-- David Walliams -
-
Satire is people as they are; romanticism, people as they would like to be; realism, people as they seem with their insides left out.
-- Dawn Powell -
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.
-- E. L. Doctorow -
I like to write a lot of satire.
-- Earl King -
Lampoons, like squibs, may make a present blaze; but time and thunder pay respect to bays.
-- Edmund Waller -
-
One man's pointlessness is another's barbed satire.
-- Franklin P. Adams -
In general satire, every man perceives A slight attack, yet neither fears nor grieves.
-- George Crabbe -
Satire is what closes on Saturday night.
-- George S. Kaufman -
Satire of satire tends to be self-canceling, and deliberate shock tactics soon lose their ability to shock, especially when they're too deliberate.
-- Herb Caen -
-
Occasionally, the horrors of life in North Korea do show up in our American satire.
-- Jennifer Armintrout -
If you're going to get into social criticism with absurdity and satire, you can't be politically correct when you do that.
-- John Cusack -
I like the George Romero films, which were really great, social satire movies; really twisted.
-- John Cusack -
Satire is a kind of poetry in which human vices are reprehended.
-- John Dryden -
-
Satire among the Romans, but not among the Greeks, was a bitter invective poem.
-- John Dryden -
A little wit and a great deal of ill-nature will furnish a man for satire; but the greatest instance of wit is to commend well.
-- John Tillotson -
Satire that is seasonable and just is often more effectual than law or gospel.
-- Josh Billings -
Satires which the censor can understand are justly forbidden
-- Karl Kraus -
-
Satire chooses and knows no objects. It arises by fleeing from them and their forcing themselves upon it.
-- Karl Kraus -
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.
-- Laurence Housman -
Satire is tragedy plus time.
-- Lenny Bruce -
Satire is focused bitterness.
-- Leo Rosten -
-
Good satire hopefully provides thought-provoking conversation.
-- Lizz Winstead -
Fools are my theme, let satire be my song.
-- Lord Byron -
Satire should, like a polished razor keen, Wound with a touch that's scarcely felt or seen.
-- Mary Wortley Montagu -
How do we get a pantomime cow on set. Jeez, the rigours of satire.
-- Mel Smith -
-
You can't debate satire. Either you get it or you don't.
-- Michael Moore -
Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful. I only aim at the powerful. When satire is aimed at the powerless, it is not only cruel -- it's vulgar.
-- Molly Ivins -
Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful.
-- Molly Ivins -
I would play hooky from school and spend all day in the movie theaters. Consequently, I learned satire in all its subtle forms.
-- Nile Rodgers -
-
A satirist, often in danger himself, has the bravery of knowing that to withhold wit's conjecture is to endanger the species.
-- Penelope Gilliatt -
If an historian were to relate truthfully all the crimes, weaknesses, and disorders of mankind, his readers would take his work for satire rather than for history.
-- Pierre Bayle -
Verse satire indeed is entirely our own.
-- Quintilian -
I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire
-- Salman Rushdie -
-
Satire is, indeed, the only sort of composition in which the Latin poets whose works have come down to us were not mere imitators of foreign models; and it is therefore the sort of composition in which they have never been excelled.
-- Thomas B. Macaulay -
Political satire became obsolete when they awarded Henry Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize.
-- Tom Lehrer -
Satire dramatizes better than any other use of it, the inherent contradiction of free speech that it functions best when what is being said is at its most outrageous.
-- Tony Hendra -
I never wanted to do political satire because it seems too surface to me.
-- Tracey Ullman -
-
Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
-- Vladimir Nabokov -
You must not think that a satiric style allows of scandalous and brutish words; the better sort abhor scurrility.
-- Wentworth Dillon, 4th Earl of Roscommon -
Wickedly funny to read and morally bracing as only good satire can be.
-- William Styron -
Satire has a great big glaring target. If successful, it blasts a great big hole in the center. Directness there must be and singleness of aim: it is all aim, all trajectory.
-- Wyndham Lewis -
-
Wherever there is objective truth, there is satire.
-- Wyndham Lewis -
Hollywood is horrible... it's beyond satire.
-- Yahoo Serious -
Conventional show-biz savvy held that Americans hated to be the objects of satire.
-- Carroll O'Connor -
I don't want to call the show [ "Mary and Jane" ] a satire because it is not, but there are satirical elements.
-- Harry Elfont -
-
life becomes satire in real time, what good is the premiere satire magazine? It might as well just be the newspaper. You could pick up The Wall Street Journal and be like, "Oh, what a funny Onion headline!" And then the editor of The Onion is like, "Huh. I guess you won't be needing me anymore."
-- Moshe Kasher
