Brittany > Brittany's Quotes

“Judges... are picked out from the most dextrous lawyers, who are grown old or lazy, and having been biased all their lives against truth or equity, are under such a fatal necessity of favoring fraud, perjury and oppression, that I have known several of them to refuse a large bribe from the side where justice lay, rather than injure the faculty by doing any thing unbecoming their nature in office.”
― Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels

“It is a maxim among these lawyers, that whatever hath been done before may legally be done again: and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice and the general reason of mankind. These, under the name of precedents, they produce as authorities, to justify the most iniquitous opinions; and the judges never fail of decreeing accordingly.”
― Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels

“I cannot but conclude that the Bulk of your Natives, to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth.”
― Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels

“May you live every day of your life.”
― Jonathan Swift

“When a great genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign; that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."

[Thoughts on Various Subjects]”
― Jonathan Swift , Abolishing Christianity and Other Essays

“Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.”
― Jonathan Swift

“We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.”
― Jonathan Swift

“Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.”
― Alexander Pope

“Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.”
― Jonathan Swift

“A soldier is a "Yahoo" hired to kill in cold blood as many of his own Species, who have never offended him, as possibly he can.”
― Jonathan Swift

“If a man makes me keep my distance, the comfort is, he keeps his at the same time.”
― Jonathan Swift

“Fine words! I wonder where you stole them.”
― Jonathan Swift

“There are few, very few, that will own themselves in a mistake.”
― Jonathan Swift

“We of this age have discovered a shorter, and more prudent method to become scholars and wits, without the fatigue of reading or of thinking.”
― Jonathan Swift

“If it means something, take it to heart. If it means nothing, it's nothing. Let it go.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Other Boleyn Girl

“You can smile when your heart is breaking because you're a woman.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Other Boleyn Girl

“For men love what they cannot have, and hate what they cannot control.”
― Robin Maxwell, The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn

“Oh yes. Draw your hem back from my mud, little sister.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Other Boleyn Girl

“I had meant my promise to George. I had said that I was, before anything else, a Boleyn and a Howard through and through; but now, sitting in th shadowy room, looking out over the gray slates of the city, and up at the dark clouds leaning on the roof of Westminster Palace, I suddenly realized that George was wrong, and that my family was wrong, and that I had been wrong-- for all my life. I was not a Howard before anything else. Before anything else I was a woman who was capable of passion and who had a great need and a great desire for love, I didn't want the rewards for which Anne had surrendered her youth. I didn' want the arid glamour of George's life, I wanted the heat and the sweat and the passion of a man that I could love and trust. And I wanted to give myself to him: not for advantage, but for desire.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Other Boleyn Girl

“I woke at dawn every morning to his touch, the delight of his warmth and the heady smell of his skin. I had never before lain with a man who had loved me completely, for myself, and it was a dizzy experience. I had never lain with a man whose touch I adored without any need to hide my adoration, or exaggerate it, or adjust it at all. I simply loved him as if he were my one and only lover, and he loved me too with the same simplicty of appetite and disire which made me wonder what I thought I had been doing all those years when I had been dealing in the false coin of vanity and lust. I had not known then that all along there had been this other currency of pure gold.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Other Boleyn Girl