Quotes About Satire

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.

All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.

But the divinest poem, or the life of a great man, is the severest satire.... The greater the genius, the keener the edge of the satire.

'As Long As I Know I'm Getting Paid' is a satire. Lyrically, I want to be direct. With my history in Fall Out Boy, there's some expectation that I'm going to be lyrically obtuse. But that song is a straight-faced satire of consumerism.

A fondness for satire indicates a mind pleased with irritating others; for myself, I never could find amusement in killing flies.

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.

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.

I mean, sometimes we do do that, The National Anthem was a caustic satire and sometimes that's the way to go with the story rather than me being particularly misanthropic.

Pornographers are the enemies of women only because our contemporary ideology of pornography does not encompass the possibility of change, as if we were the slaves of history and not its makers. . . . Pornography is a satire on human pretensions.

People are always looking for something to hate on. If this is something for them to target and hate on, that's their thing. I look at it as satire.

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.

Praise undeserved, is satire in disguise.

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

If there is a god, I think he has a sense of humour. He does not require human beings to protect him from satire.

The purpose of satire has been rightly stated as to strip off the veneer of comforting illusion and cosy half truth, and our job, as I see it, is to put it back again!

Satire exists for the purpose of killing the social being [for the sake of] the true individual, the real human being.

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.

Producing satire is kind of hopeless because of the literacy rate of the American public.

It has been said that the historian is the avenger, and that standing as a judge between the parties and rivalries and causes of bygone generations he can lift up the fallen and beat down the proud, and by his exposures and his verdicts, his satire and his moral indignation, can punish unrighteousness, avenge the injured or reward the innocent.

"Moksha" is really a satire of myself. I've always been interested in Eastern spirituality. I'm particularly interested in enlightenment and the spiritual pursuit to liberate ourselves (I'm a Buddhist at heart). During my teenage years, I imagined I'd end up going to India to become a yogi; study with the last living saints in a cave; give up all my worldly possessions; learn to levitate. And there's still part of me that can see myself "disappearing" for some years at an ashram somewhere.

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.

It is hard for power to enjoy or incorporate humour and satire in its system of control.

Satire is people as they are; romanticism, people as they would like to be; realism, people as they seem with their insides left out.

These men, in teaching us how to die, have at the same time taught us how to live. If this man's acts and words do not create a revival, it will be the severest possible satire on the acts and words that do. It is the best news that America has ever heard.... How many a man who was lately contemplating suicide has now something to live for!

My biggest influence growing up was Mad magazine, which is a very text-heavy form of visual satire. I didn’t grow up wanting to draw donkeys and elephants with the names of politicians written across them.

A piercing satire, a poignant family drama and an investigation of the competing claims of honesty, loyalty, ambition and love.

What we need is a rebirth of satire, of dissent, of irreverence, of an uncompromising insistence that phoniness is phony and platitudes are platitudinous.

There are people who believe in Egypt that I - I'm actually - I'm getting paid by external powers and external intelligence entities in order to use satire to bring down the government.

The moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.

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

As for "toothy kindness" - I think all traditions are full of this sort of tough kindness. If someone is on a wrong or dull path, and someone else startles them into awareness of that, then that's a blessing. And the method by which the startle is obtained might be anger, or satire, or an intentionally applied indifference. But that is, of course, a fine line.

There is parody, when you make fun of people who are smarter than you; satire, when you make fun of people who are richer than you; and burlesque, when you make fun of both while taking your clothes off.