Jonathan Swift — a remark

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

Observing how satire exposes human hypocrisy while leaving self-knowledge difficult · Preface to The Battle of the Books (1704)

About Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift

30 November 1667–19 October 1745

The life of Jonathan Swift presents one of literature's most fascinating paradoxes: a clergyman who wrote with brutal satirical force, an Irishman who felt himself English, a conservative who championed the oppressed, and a misanthrope whose fury arose from disappointed idealism. Born into poverty and obscurity, Swift…

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