Lampoons, like squibs, may make a present blaze; but time and thunder pay respect to bays.
The feathered arrow of satire has oft been wet with the heart's blood of its victims.
Satire is not a social dynamite. But it is a social indicator: it shows that new men are knocking at the door.
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.
Satire must not be a kind of superfluous ill will, but ill will from a higher point of view. Ridiculous man, divine God. Or else, hatred against the bogged-down vileness of average man as against the possible heights that humanity might attain.
Though folly, robed in purple, shines, Though vice exhausts Peruvian mines, Yet shall they tremble and turn pale When satire wields her mighty flail.
Satirists do expose their own ill nature.
I like the George Romero films, which were really great, social satire movies; really twisted.
It is as hard to satirize well a man of distinguished vices, as to praise well a man of distinguished virtues.
For a young and presumptuous poet a disposition to write satires is one of the most dangerous he can encourage. It tempts him to personalities, which are not always forgiven after he has repented and become ashamed of them.
Simonides, a poet famous in his generation, is, I think, author of the oldest satire that is now extant, and, as some say, of the first that was ever written.
Satire is tragedy plus time.
A satire should expose nothing but what is corrigible, and should make a due discrimination between those that are and those that are not the proper objects of it.
It seems like there's a lot of people who just do not understand satire. They think it's weird. There's people who just don't understand you portray something or just explore a character, it means you're condoning it, saying this is the way to live.
Among the writers of antiquity there are none who instruct us more openly in the manners of their respective times in which they lived than those who have employed themselves in satire, under whatever dress it may appear.
If you're going to get into social criticism with absurdity and satire, you can't be politically correct when you do that.
Most satirists are indeed a public scourge; Their mildest physic is a farrier's purge; Their acrid temper turns, as soon as stirr'd, The milk of their good purpose all to curd. Their zeal begotten, as their works rehearse, By lean despair upon an empty purse.
The end of satire is the amendment of vices by correction; and he who writes honestly is no more an enemy to the offender than the physician to the patient when he prescribes harsh remedies.
Should a writer single out and point his raillery at particular persons, or satirize the miserable, he might be sure of pleasing a great part of his readers, but must be a very ill man if he could please himself.
Satire among the Romans, but not among the Greeks, was a bitter invective poem.
It is certain that satirical poems were common at Rome from a very early period. The rustics, who lived at a distance from the seat of government, and took little part in the strife of factions, gave vent to their petty local animosities in coarse Fescennine verse.
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.
Satire is what closes Saturday night.
Friendly satire may be compared to a fine lancet, which gently breathes a vein for health's sake.
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.
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