These satire quotes will inspire you. Satire, a way of using humor to show that someone or something is foolish, weak, bad, etc., or the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people’s stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging satire quotes, satire sayings, and satire proverbs.
Best Satire Quotes
- “Satire is moral outrage transformed into comic art.” ~ Philip Roth
- “You can’t make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you’re doing is recording it.” ~ Art Buchwald
- “Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful.” ~ Molly Ivins
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“Satire should, like a polished razor keen, Wound with a touch that’s scarcely felt or seen.” ~ Mary Wortley Montagu
- “If satire is to be effective, the audience must be aware of the thing satirized.” ~ Gore Vidal
- “Satire is a composition of salt and mercury; and it depends upon the different mixture and preparation of those ingredients, that it comes out a noble medicine, or a rank poison.” ~ Francis Jeffrey, Lord Jeffrey
- “Satire must always accompany any free society. It is an absolute necessity. Even in the most repressive medieval kingdoms, they understood the need for the court jester, the one soul allowed to tell the truth through laughter.” ~ Joe Randazzo
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“Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind reception it meets with in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.” ~ Jonathan Swift
- “Satire is a kind of poetry in which human vices are reprehended.” ~ John Dryden
- “Fools are my theme, let satire be my song.” ~ Lord Byron
- “Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
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“Praise undeserved, is satire in disguise.” ~ Alexander Pope
- “In the present state of the world it is difficult not to write lampoons.” ~ Juvenal
- “It is difficult not to write satire.” ~ Juvenal
- “When dunces are satiric, I take it for a panegyric.” ~ Jonathan Swift
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“People say satire is dead. It’s not dead; it’s alive and living in the White House.” ~ Robin Williams
- “Satire’s my weapon, but I’m too discreet To run amuck, and tilt at all I meet.” ~ Alexander Pope
- “Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.” ~ Vladimir Nabokov
- “Tomorrow is a satire on today, And shows its weakness.” ~ Edward Young
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“What we need is a rebirth of satire, of dissent, of irreverence, of an uncompromising insistence that phoniness is phony and platitudes are platitudinous.” ~ Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
- “Satires and lampoons on particular people circulate more by giving copies in confidence to the friends of the parties, than by printing them.” ~ Richard Brinsley Sheridan
- “Verse satire indeed is entirely our own.” ~ Quintilian
- “When satire flies abroad on falsehood’s wing, Short is her life, and impotent her sting; But when to truth allied, the wound she gives Sinks deep, and to remotest ages lives.” ~ Charles Churchill , Satire quotes in life
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“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.” ~ Jonathan Swift
- “Truth is quite beyond the reach of satire. There is so brave a simplicity in her that she can no more be made ridiculous than an oak or a pine.” ~ James Russell Lowell
- “Satire is what closes on Saturday night.” ~ George S. Kaufman
- “Conventional show-biz savvy held that Americans hated to be the objects of satire.” ~ Carroll O’Connor
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“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
- “Hollywood is horrible… it’s beyond satire.” ~ Yahoo Serious
- “Friendly satire may be compared to a fine lancet, which gently breathes a vein for health’s sake.” ~ Samuel Richardson
- “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
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“Satire that is seasonable and just is often more effectual than law or gospel.” ~ Josh Billings
- “Satire is the disease of art.” ~ Nicolas Chamfort
- “It is hard for power to enjoy or incorporate humour and satire in its system of control.” ~ Dario Fo
- “In my youth I thought of writing a satire on mankind! but now in my age I think I should write an apology for them.” ~ Horace
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“I never wanted to do political satire because it seems too surface to me.” ~ Tracey Ullman
- “I cry all the time when I watch ‘Glee’ because I don’t know if it’s satire or melodrama and that makes me feel like the writing is aware of itself, and that makes it OK to cry.” ~ David Sedaris
- “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.” ~ William Cowper
- “Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.” ~ Voltaire
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“Satire is tragedy plus time. You give it enough time, the public, the reviewers will allow you to satirize it. Which is rather ridiculous, when you think about it.” ~ Lenny Bruce
- “Satire is what closes Saturday night.” ~ Juvenal
- “Satire, being levelled at all, is never resented for an offence by any.” ~ Jonathan Swift
- “Satire is dependent on strong beliefs, and on strong beliefs wounded.” ~ Anita Brookner
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“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
- “One man’s pointlessness is another’s barbed satire.” ~ Franklin P. Adams
- “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
- “By rights, satire is a lonely and introspective occupation, for nobody can describe a fool to the life without much patient self-inspection.” ~ Frank Moore Colby
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“In general satire, every man perceives A slight attack, yet neither fears nor grieves.” ~ George Crabbe
- “Satire is at once the most agreeable and most dangerous of mental qualities. It always pleases when it is refined, but we always fear those who use it too much; yet satire should be allowed when unmixed with spite, and when the person satirized can join in the satire.” ~ Francois de La Rochefoucauld
- “Popular culture bombards us with examples of animals being humanized for all sorts of purposes, ranging from education to entertainment to satire to propaganda. Walt Disney, for example, made us forget that Mickey is a mouse, and Donald a duck. George Orwell laid a cover of human societal ills over a population of livestock.” ~ Frans de Waal
- “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.” ~ Paul Klee
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“I like the George Romero films, which were really great, social satire movies; really twisted.” ~ John Cusack
- “Though folly, robed in purple, shines, Though vice exhausts Peruvian mines, Yet shall they tremble and turn pale When satire wields her mighty flail.” ~ Charles Churchill
- “Satirists do expose their own ill nature.” ~ Isaac Watts
- “The satirist who writes nothing but satire should write but little – or it will seem that his satire springs rather from his own caustic nature than from the sins of the world in which he lives.” ~ Anthony Trollope
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“Satire or sense, alas! Can Sports feel? Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?” ~ Alexander Pope
- “Unless a love of virtue light the flame,
Satire is, more than those he brands, to blame;
He hides behind a magisterial air
He own offences, and strips others’ bare.” ~ William Cowper , Satire quotes on love - “When television producers say it is the parents obligation to keep children away from the tube, they reach the self satire point of warning that their own product is unsuitable for consumption” ~ Gregg Easterbrook
- “The feathered arrow of satire has oft been wet with the heart’s blood of its victims.” ~ Benjamin Disraeli
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“Lampoons, like squibs, may make a present blaze; but time and thunder pay respect to bays.” ~ Edmund Waller
- “There is a place in this world for satire, but there is a time when satire ends and intolerance and bigotry toward religious beliefs… begins.” ~ Isaac Hayes
- “Satire is not a social dynamite. But it is a social indicator: it shows that new men are knocking at the door.” ~ Jacob Bronowski
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“Satire is not a social dynamite. But it is a social indicator: it shows that new men are knocking at the door.” ~ Jacob Bronowski
- “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.” ~ James Thurber
- “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.” ~ Mike Judge
