Quotes About Satire

We have entered a period of intolerance which combines, as it sometimes does in America, with a sugary taste for euphemism. This conjunction fosters events that go beyond the wildest dream of satire- if satire existed in America anymore; perhaps the reason for its weakness is that reality has superseded it.

I've never been much drawn towards satire of any kind. I don't like that style whereby you kind of stitch people up. But the deeper thing is that I just find these people so impressive and admirable.

For even satire is a form of sympathy. It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening.

The real issues I don't think most people touch. The Clinton jokes are all about Monica Lewinsky and all that stuff and not about the important things, like the fact that he wouldn't ban landmines...I'm not tempted to write a song about George W. Bush. I couldn't figure out what sort of song I would write. That's the problem: I don't want to satirize George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporize them. And that's not funny....OK, well, if I say that, I might get a shock laugh, but it's not really satire.

Satire is tragedy plus time.

satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.

But satire, ever moral, ever new, Delights the reader and instructs him, too. She, if good sense refine her sterling page, Oft shakes some rooted folly of the age.

Satire that is seasonable and just is often more effectual than law or gospel.

The 'Rise, Rebel, Resist' video is a reflection of the outrage the American people are feeling at the absurd hypocrisy, and overwhelming nonsense and balderdash plaguing Washington D.C. It uses a bit of satire and a bit of wishful thinking to form this powerful amalgam of imagery that nourishes and empowers the living art of the song. Our message is clear: Either these elected officials do their job and protect the rights and lives of ALL Americans or be prepared to face the consequences.

Occasionally, the horrors of life in North Korea do show up in our American satire.

Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.

It is said that truth comes from the mouths of fools and children: I wish every good mind which feels an inclination for satire would reflect that the finest satirist always has something of both in him.

Humor is essential to a successful tactician, for the most potent weapons known to mankind are satire and ridicule.

Satire is the disease of art.

In short, all good things are wild and free. There is something in a strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by thehuman voice,--take the sound of a bugle in a summer night, for instance,--which by its wildness, to speak without satire, reminds me of the cries emitted by wild beasts in their native forests. It is so much of their wildness as I can understand. Give me for my friends and neighbors wild men, not tame ones. The wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet.

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.

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.

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.

How do we get a pantomime cow on set. Jeez, the rigours of satire.

What you want to do is talk about ideas, you write a novel, you have a lecture about those ideas. Satire and comedy are really the only film mediums where you can get into ideas and have people leave the theater without being moralized.

The biggest problem I had with starring in Scrubs were the black doctors. I just had to keep telling myself this show was satire.

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.

Poetry can be criticized only through poetry. A critique which itself is not a work of art, either in content as representation of the necessary impression in the process of creation, or through its beautiful form and in its liberal tone in the spirit of the old Roman satire, has no right of citizenship in the realm of art.