Quotes About Satire

I tell the truth and I don't try to sugarcoat things. But I also decided that if you don't use humor or satire, then it's just too dark all the time. And one of my favorite literary works is A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift. As you know, that was an enormously famous satire piece that was able to point out, you know, things to people in a different way. And I do believe that satire and humor can reveal truth in a way that sometimes doesn't get revealed through other means. And so I decided to, every now and then, use satire and humor as well.

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.

Satire is meant to have teeth; satire is meant to be dangerous. But it also happens to be fun because subversion and telling the right kind of people to go to hell is supposed to feel good.

Through my satire I make little people so big that afterwards they are worthy objects of my satire and no one can reproach me any longer.

In the years since The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, Voinovich has sharpened his satire, and Monumental Propaganda is a novel that slashes and rips -- but not on every page. He expands his narrative to accommodate shrewd philosophy and inventive portraiture, a very amusing disquisition on Soviet latrines and a number of outlandish plot developments. In his translation, Andrew Bromfield deftly shifts his tone and tools as required, remaining true to Voinovich's Vonnegut-like playfulness and appreciation of the absurd.

By rights, satire is a lonely and introspective occupation, for nobody can describe a fool to the life without much patient self-inspection.

The more repression there is, the more need there is for irreverence toward those who are responsible for that repression. But too often sarcasm passes for irony, name-calling passes for insight, bleeped-out four-letter words pass for wit, and lowest-common-denominator jokes pass for analysis. Satire should have a point of view. It doesn't have to get a belly laugh. It does have to present criticism.

To me, that's where a lot of satire lies. News used to hold itself to a higher plane and slowly it has dissolved into, well, me.

Tomorrow is a satire on today, And shows its weakness.

For years, reality has been nipping at the heels of satire. Now, it's finally caught up. I don't need to make this stuff up.

I don't want to call the show [ "Mary and Jane" ] a satire because it is not, but there are satirical elements.

When you look at golf films before us they're all - garbage or satire. A lot of sports films tend to vilify the opposition. Where the opposition becomes this big angry monster, so big you can't beat him.

If goodness were only a theory, it were a pity it should be lost to the world. There are a number of things, the idea of which is a clear gain to the mind. Let people, for instance, rail at friendship, genius, freedom, as long as they will -the very names of these despised qualities are better than anything else that could be substituted for them, and embalm even the most envenomed satire against them.

I've found that there's a pretty wide range of silly. I don't want to do outright parody, because I like keeping my own characters and stories at the core of the books. And to be honest, I'm not smart enough to do the kind of wickedly sharp satire you get from someone like Pratchett.

Hopefully we have a slightly different vibe, but also East Side is where a lot young people live. It is a really fun, trendy, funky neighborhood, and it is ripe for satire, that area specifically.

Good satire is about attacking the powerful, and that tends to be more the purview of the left. Maybe there's something about the conservative mindset that confuses mean-spirited name-calling and insults with actual humor.

Satire doesn't effect change.

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.

Conventional show-biz savvy held that Americans hated to be the objects of satire.

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.

We may observe in humorous authors that the faults they chiefly ridicule have often a likeness in themselves. Cervantes had much of the knight-errant in him; Sir George Etherege was unconsciously the Fopling Flutter of his own satire; Goldsmith was the same hero to chambermaids, and coward to ladies that he has immortalized in his charming comedy; and the antiquarian frivolities of Jonathan Oldbuck had their resemblance in Jonathan Oldbuck's creator.

Verse satire indeed is entirely our own.

You can't debate satire. Either you get it or you don't.

It's a great time to be doing political satire when the world is on a knife edge.

Satire, being levelled at all, is never resented for an offence by any.

What is a miracle?--'Tis a reproach, 'Tis an implicit satire on mankind; And while it satisfies, it censures too.

I don't know that you can do it as a satire. I mean, the business is crazy enough as it is. It's like doing Wag The Dog - we took a thing that was almost completely absurd on one level, and then ultimately those things came about.

We're never going to be the ultimate-insider look. You can do 50 insider looks at this Hollywood business, and the satire didn't intrigue me. I think others can do that.

As long as there is satire, the poet is, as it were, particeps criminis.

Satire recoils whenever charged too high; round your own fame the fatal splinters fly.

A man is angry at a libel because it is false, but at a satire because it is true.

Political satire became obsolete when they awarded Henry Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize.