Quotes About Satirist

#1. I've spent my entire career being a satirist.

Al Franken

#2. Comedy to the Senate? Well, there certainly hasn't been a satirist or a political satirist who's done that. So, that really was uncharted territory during the campaign. But I think it's a good thing. Some people thought that it was an odd career arc, but to me it made absolute sense.

Al Franken

#3. [On Jane Austen] She was fully possessed of the idealism which is a necessary ingredient of the great satirist. If she criticized the institutions of earth, it was because she had very definite ideas regarding the institutions of heaven.

Rebecca West

#4. Some critics of my work took the view that a satirist should defer to the finer feelings of his readers and respect widely held beliefs.

David Low

#5. I first adventure, follow me who list And be the second English satirist

Joseph Hall

#6. [The satirist] must fully possess, at least in the world of the imagination, the quality the lack of which he is deriding in others.

Rebecca West

#7. When Actions are a Censure upon themselves, the Reciter will always be consider'd as a Satirist.

Charlotte Lennox

#8. A satirist is a man whose flesh creeps so at the ugly and the savage and the incongruous aspects of society that he has to express them as brutally and nakedly as possible in order to get relief.

John Dos Passos

#9. There's so much hate that we direct externally that we forget we have our own psychos. But that's the role of the satirist - you have to examine your own country and say, 'look!'

Carl Hiaasen

#10. The satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive and eventually releases him again for another chance.

Peter De Vries

#11. A satirist, often in danger himself, has the bravery of knowing that to withhold wit's conjecture is to endanger the species.

Penelope Gilliatt

#12. I'd rather call myself a mischief-maker, an imp, rather than a satirist. Satirist sounds so self important. Plus no one is calling himself an imp right now. It makes me feel special.

Mo Rocca

#13. Blessed is the satirist; and blessed the ironist; blessed the witty scoffer, and blessed the sentimentalist; for each, having seen one spoke of the wheel, thinks to have seen all, and is content.

Christopher Morley

#14. The satirist isn't just looking at things ironically but militantly - he wants to change them, and intends to have an effect on the world.

Martin Amis

#15. Teain had no difficulty generating the indignation of a satirist. He lack the patience of a reformer.

H.W. Brands

#16. I'm accused of, and perhaps rightly so, of not being mean enough. I've been taken to task in many a book review; a good satirist has to, you know, has to kill.

Christopher Buckley

#17. Statistics, one may hope, will improve gradually, and become good for something. Meanwhile, it is to be feared the crabbed satirist was partly right, as things go: "A judicious man," says he, "looks at Statistics, not to get knowledge, but to save himself from having ignorance foisted on him."

Thomas Carlyle

#18. If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

Quentin Crisp

#19. A satirist is someone who has a very skeptical view of human nature, but who still has the optimism to make some sort of a joke out of it. However brutal that joke might be.

Stanley Kubrick

#20. Any satirist writing a futuristic novel who had imagined a President Reagan during the Eisenhower years would have been accused of perpetrating a piece of crude, contemptible, adolescent, anti-American wickedness, when, in fact, he would have succeeded, as prophetic sentry, where Orwell failed.

Philip Roth

#21. Satire works best when it hews close to the line between the outlandish and the possible - and as that line continues to grow thinner, the satirist's task becomes ever more difficult.

Graydon Carter

#22. I love Washington. I have an affection for the place. For a satirist, I think it's sort of Disneyland. I mean, you know, there's always some inspiration in the morning's headlines.

Christopher Buckley

#23. Bret Easton Ellis is a social satirist; I consider myself aligned with how he does things. Bret doesn't write about that which he loves about the world, he writes about what disgusts him. You'd be a disturbed individual if you came out and said, 'I love these characters'.

Roger Avary

#24. Rory Bremner I have no problem with; he is a satirist, and a very funny one, too.

Richie Benaud

#25. A satirist that criticizes religion is seen as a satanist.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#26. Minnesotans know the difference between the job of satirist and the job of senator. And so do I.

Al Franken

#27. I'm not really a political satirist. I don't kid myself. I'm more interested in doing the mannerisms and the personality.

Rich Little

#28. It didn't seem fair to me that Jon Stewart's rally didn't get the same kind of attention that Glenn Beck's did. Why was Beck's seen as checking the thermometer of the country, and Jon Stewart just dismissed as a satirist?

David Sedaris

#29. I would say I'm an ironist not a satirist. All you do is you take existing tendencies and crank them up, just turn up the volume dial. Which is a technique of science fiction, apart from anything else.

Martin Amis

#30. I'm a satirist, so I've got boxing gloves on if the person is worthy of satire. But I'm not an assassin. If that ever happens, it's only because something happened during the interview that got me going, and then I had to translate my feelings to the mouth of the character.

Stephen Colbert

#31. The satirist is prevented by repulsion from gaining a better knowledge of the world he is attracted to, yet he is forced by attraction to concern himself with the world that repels him.

Italo Calvino

#32. If you don't know Tom Lehrer, you should - in addition to being a classical pianist, mathematician, songwriter, satirist, researcher at Los Alamos and, he claims, inventor of the Jell-O shot, he is just delightfully funny and graceful.

Rachel Sklar

#33. In a more intellectually rigorous age, I wouldn't be talked about as a satirist at all. I would just be a topical comedian.

Rory Bremner

#34. A satirist is never certain whether he/she will be acclaimed or punished.

Edgar Johnson

#35. The political satirist usually votes against their own interests, but the bottom line is that it doesn't really matter.

Lizz Winstead

#36. He has the obligation to society that any human being has. I don't think a satirist has any greater obligation to society than a bricklayer or anybody else.

Shel Silverstein

#37. The Dark Satirist, like the Dark Knight - that could be a good name for a superhero.

Bassem Youssef

#38. 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

#39. Life is so absurd now that it is almost impossible to be a satirist in this era.

Fran Lebowitz

#40. If I'm a cruel satirist at least I'm not a hyprocrite: I never judge what other people do. Neither a politician nor a priest, I never censor what others do. Neither a philospher nor a psychiatrist, I never bother trying to analyze or resolve my fears and neuroses

Federico Fellini

#41. I think the satirist is always basically optimistic. The satirist's complaint about society is always that it doesn't measure up to a fairly high ideal he has. I think that even the bitterest satirist, even a man like Swift, was probably rather an optimist at heart.

John Dos Passos

#42. I found that not having a public profile was not hurting the work, and it freed me up to be the satirist I wanted to be.

Garry Trudeau

#43. The needs of the nation are not necessarily convergent with the needs of the deadline satirist.

Christopher Buckley

#44. I think I'm more of an absurdist than a satirist. I think I'm more of a - humanist? I hate to say it!

Mike White

#45. 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.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

#46. To be a satirist, at all events. The venom of Pope is what is needed. The sense of delight
the expansion and the compassion of Shakespeare is no good at all for that. He is a bad comic.

Wyndham Lewis

#47. A political satirist's job is to draw blood. I'm not so much interested in politics as I am in overthrowing the government.

Mort Sahl

#48. She [Gypsy Rose Lee] was a sophisticated self-satirist with a contagious delight in the comedy of sex. She was coy; she was sly; she always had a witty quip; she had an intensely dramatic presence.

Karen Abbott

#49. The familiar writer is apt to be his own satirist. Out of his own mouth is he judged.

Edwin Percy Whipple

#50. But you do have to learn, if you want to be a satirist, you can't be part of the party. Meaning, you can't go horseback riding with Jackie O in Central Park if you're going to make a joke about her that night.

Joan Rivers

#51. I've known one thing for a long time: there's a role in the big machine even for someone who makes fun of it.

Christa Wolf

#52. Satirists do expose their own ill nature.

Isaac Watts

#53. VW used to mean FAHRVERGNUGEN and now it's FARFROMUNION!

Birgit Von Schondorf

Birgit Von Schondorf