Satirical Quotes

#1. After the horrific massacre Wednesday at the French weekly satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, perhaps the West will finally put away its legion of useless tropes trying to deny the relationship between violence and radical Islam.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

#2. In my work, and in my psyche, there's some very sentimental, traditional, conventional side that's always in argument with a more radical, sarcastic side. Some of my stories are really sentimental, but they're layered over with weird, satirical stuff.

George Saunders

#3. Cummings' career as a writer - and a painter - was as wobbly as his love life. He tried his hand at playwriting, satirical essays, and even a dance scenario for Lincoln Kirsten.

Billy Collins

#4. Created sick, and then commanded to be well. This is one of the first, easiest, and most obvious of the satirical maxims that eventually lay waste to the illusion of faith.

Christopher Hitchens

#5. Good Humor is the best shield against the darts of satirical raillery

Charles Simmons

#6. 'SCTV' was the concept of a group ensemble doing satirical things. 'Saturday Night Live's sketches were broader than ours, more universal.

Joe Flaherty

#7. Slanders, sir, for the satirical rogue says here that old men have grey beards, that their faces are wrinkled, their eyes purging think amber and plum-tree gum, and that they have a plentiful lack of wit, together with most weak hams.

William Shakespeare

#8. Catch-22 is the greatest satirical work in English since Erewhon ... remarkable ... This is a book that I could wish everyone to read. It is a book which should help us feel more clearly

Philip Toynbee

#9. I don't think the nature of my poetry is satirical or even ironic, I think it's essentially lyrical but again I don't know if it's my position to say what my poetry is like.

Kenneth Koch

#10. Italian politicians are too stupid to deserve my vote, but they can get over it with my critical, denunciatory, satirical, vitriolic and vituperative invectives.

William C. Brown

#11. I wasn't playing Nixon's satirical stick figure. I was playing Nixon the man. As an actor, I felt I had to get to the deeply flawed humanity of the guy.

Harry Shearer

#12. I want to be part of movies that have important and interesting subjects but are not depressing and are rather satirical and funny.

Terence Lewis

#13. The fictional work is a kind of actor that wears a satirical garb but can put on other costumes as well.

Will Self

#14. I don't try to be satirical. I just try to get what's in my head on the page. And that part is hard for me to do. It takes a long, long time to make it poetic, somewhat essayistic.

Paul Beatty

#15. Well, I think that if you sincerely try to imagine what life is like for another person - not in a mocking way, not in a satirical way, but in a sincere, compassionate way - I don't think that's exploitive.

Curtis Sittenfeld

#16. We cannot have a society in which some dictator some place can start imposing censorship here in the United States. If somebody is able to intimidate folks out of releasing a satirical movie, imagine what's going to happen when they see a documentary they don't like or news reports they don't like.

Barack Obama

#17. It just happened that the public happened to, uh, appreciate the satirical quality of these crazy things.

Rube Goldberg

#18. Trivial details have been summoned, in part, to make a satirical point about upper-middle-class marriage-that the whole thing can slip away between the white wine and the arugula salad.

David Denby

#19. The style, often found difficult in the earlier books, is just as individual but more perfectly modulated to experience, and the dialogue is much closer to contemporary idiom, especially when those cadences have been masterfully twisted to satirical ends.

Geoffrey Dutton

#20. Journalists who are devoted to strictly factual reporting take particular pleasure from satirical news outlets that have the liberty to laugh and even mock the hypocrisy that reporters and editors must simply observe without comment.

Tom Rachman

#21. The importance of satire is bringing more people to the table. There are a lot of average citizens who aren't interested in politics and would be more interested if it's brought to them in a comedic, funny, satirical way.

Bassem Youssef

#22. Orwell is almost our litmus test. Some of his satirical writing looks like reality these days.

John Pilger

#23. 'The Author' is subtly unflinching in its satirical attack on certain practices in the creation of art and the mediation of violence.

Tim Crouch

#24. I was greatly influenced by 'The Goons' and 'Monty Python' reconstituting what comedy was - it could come from a funny word, not just a set up and a pay-off. I liked the zaniness; they were satirical, slightly saucy and very literary in their references.

Sanjeev Bhaskar

#25. I'm not satirical in a traditional way. What I do is more about creating caricatures and cartoons. I am commentating on the nature of how we live through photography, and how you can twist an angle to create a different perception of a person.

Alison Jackson

#26. My comic sense, although deliberately Americanized, is, in its intent, much closer related to the crazy wisdom of Zen monks and the goofy genius of Taoist masters than it is to, say, the satirical gibes on Saturday Night Live. It has both a literary and a metaphysical function.

Tom Robbins

#27. A satirical poet is the check of the laymen on bad priests.

John Dryden

#28. Men ought to find the difference between saltiness and bitterness. Certainly, he that hath a satirical vein, as he maketh others afraid of his wit, so he had need be afraid of others' memory.

Francis Bacon

#29. I've always had a fondness for that satirical, Terry Gilliam - esque evil corporate megastructure, the kind of business that hangs banners that say making your life better as it throws kittens into the gears.

Chris Hardwick

#30. I eventually saw the satirical nature of caricaturing individuals.

Jonathan Shapiro

#31. I started out as a writer. Poetry and prose and also kind of satirical David Sedaris-esque stuff.

Pauley Perrette

#32. Waiting for the Electricity is a wildly original and ambitious debut, a novel that tackles cultural clashes with satirical hilarity. I haven't read a first novel this promising since The Confederacy of Dunces.

Jill Ciment

#33. You simply cannot invent any conspiracy theory so ridiculous and obviously satirical that some people somewhere don't already believe it.

Robert Anton Wilson

#34. Most important to any fake story is a plausible, realistic edge with a satirical twist that is topical.

Joey Skaggs

#35. My challenge as a satirical artist is how to present ideas to people to enable them to question and reexamine their beliefs. My hope is, that my work provokes people to look at things in a new way.

Joey Skaggs

#36. illustrated magazine: Nekrasov, 'the people's poet' (see note 15), was a contributor to Spark, an illustrated satirical journal published in Petersburg from 1859 to 1873.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#37. Ultimately, when I deliver something, a lot of times it will be from a black woman's perspective, but other times it will be just from a satirical, goofy perspective.

Jessica Williams

#38. I probably owe my political dismay to New Labour, but also my growing sense that the satirical shape of human affairs is international and historical, not glued to the tawdry ambitions of a team of politicians who represent nothing but themselves.

Andrew O'Hagan

#39. You can't be satirical and not be offensive to somebody.

Tom Lehrer

#40. You may be witty, but not satirical.

Horace Greeley

#41. I'm all in favor of people - myself included - going into the same territory if there's something that can be done with it. But if somebody says, 'Make a sequel to 'Heathers',' I feel like, no, someone should make a good movie that's a dark, satirical comedy that has that sensibility.

Michael Lehmann

#42. Gradually compositions make an appearance again. Political - satirical - conceits expressed in one figure or a few.

Paul Klee

#43. Some of it can, of course. The new satirical shows

Nick Hornby

#44. It would be easy to assume that the open letter is a symptom of the Internet age. Such is not the case. In 1774, Benjamin Franklin wrote an open letter to the prime minister of Great Britain, Lord North - a satirical call for the imposition of martial law in the colonies.

Roxane Gay

#45. I'm crushed by the responsibility of writing a satirical book.

Al Franken

#46. And because they were fond of reading, she fancied them satirical: perhaps without exactly knowing what it was to be satirical; but that did not signify. It was censure in common use, and easily given.

Jane Austen

#47. A spirit of satirical frivolity so dominated Britain in the 1960s that one critic feared the country would sink giggling into the sea.

John O'Sullivan

#48. the Roman satirical daily, Il Don Pirlone ('Mr Dickhead',

Lucy Riall

#49. All truth is valuable, and satirical criticism may be considered as useful when it rectifies error and improves judgment; he that refines the public taste is a public benefactor.

Samuel Johnson

#50. The satirical direction I have chosen is an indication of my disappointment in man, which is the opposite way of saying that I have high expectations for the human race.

Jack Levine

#51. I think satire suffered under Obama, but not because of Obama. People are more sensitive now than ever, and strong satirical voices are stifled because of that. I don't think a Clinton presidency would change that.

Michael Che

#52. The grown-ups snapped the chillies (each made a sound terse as a satirical retort), and scattered the tiny, deadly seeds in their food.

Amit Chaudhuri

#53. He had read in the newspaper satirical remarks about initial-carvers, who could find no other road to immortality.

D.H. Lawrence

#54. You can't write good satirical fiction in America because reality will quickly outdo anything you might invent.

Philip Roth

#55. I'm not trying to write a bleak and blistering screed against American civilization. I'm writing something that I hope is fun and satirical and full of possibility.

Mark Russell

#56. If you go back to 'Pretty Fly,' it was a very popish song, but there was a satirical side to it, and I think that's cool. I like the idea that it's making people think just a little bit.

Dexter Holland

#57. It is certain that satirical poems were common at Rome from a very early period. The rustics, who lived at a distance from the seat of government, and took little part in the strife of factions, gave vent to their petty local animosities in coarse Fescennine verse.

Thomas B. Macaulay

#58. They who suspect a Mephistophiles, or sneering, satirical devil, under all, have not learned the secret of true humor, which sympathizes with gods themselves, in view of their grotesque, half-finished creatures.

Henry David Thoreau

#59. Really, I protest
what is left for the satirical mind to invent when reality so surpasses it?

Jude Morgan

#60. In my opinion, Lenny Bruce was more of an influence on Zappa's satirical lyric's than anyone that I know of.

Jimmy Carl Black

#61. Since Christianity is in fact a slave religion, it is satirical at
least to see the negro adopt a slave religion, after chattel slavery was
ended. It simply underlines the fact that consciously or unconsciously, weak
humans desire the status of sheep, no matter what they say.

Tom Metzger

#62. When I was younger, when I was a teenager, the work was more satirical and funny and cartoony. And part of it was chops - if you have a more limited repertoire of stick figures and cartoon characters, they lend themselves more to humor than to tragedy.

Eric Drooker

#63. The successful cannot be unhappy
it was a contradiction in terms.

Barry Unsworth

#64. Preferring the nausea of the path to its fated and certain ending.

Patrick Bryant

#65. There are so many problems to solve on this planet first before we begin to trash other worlds.

E.A. Bucchianeri

#66. Poncho was in a red mood slanging with rage and needed to cook himself out of it , while shoving handfuls of salted peanuts down his gullet and slurping ice cold Fanta

Saira Viola

#67. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

George Orwell

#68. Tribal Chief 1: The will of the people is what is best. That is what democracy means

Tribal Chief 2: But if the people don't know what they are talking about, how can that be the best?

Leonard Wibberley

#69. Like hell he was," said the first C.I.D. man. "I'm the C.I.D. man arround here."
Major Major could barely recognize him because he was wearing a faded maroon corduroy bathrobe with open seams under both arms, linty flannel pajamas, & worn house slippers with one flapping sole.

Joseph Heller

#70. His face looked shrewd and wise, as if he knew many things, many of them not worth knowing.

E.B. White

#71. We are puzzle pieces, bragging about being puzzle pieces, rather than being the picture.

Tom Althouse

#72. The birthing wolf,
Her heart fed with tenderness,
Gave forth from ripe brown nipples,
Food to feed the universe.

Roman Payne

#73. If love is the answer, could you rephrase the question?

Lily Tomlin

#74. #Twitter: proudly promoting ghastly grammar and silly misspelling since 2006.

E.A. Bucchianeri

#75. All the people like us are we, and everyone else is they.

Rudyard Kipling

#76. All disgracers of the press in prose and verse condemned to eat nothing but their own cotton, and quench their thirst with their own ink.

Jonathan Swift

#77. I have been told the best things in life are free ~ I found them very expensive.

E.A. Bucchianeri

#78. Rejoice, Florence, seeing you are so great that over sea and land you flap your wings, and your name is widely known in Hell!

Dante Alighieri

#79. I will say this much for the nobility: that, tyrannical, murderous, rapacious and morally rotten as they were, they were deeply and enthusiastically religous. Nothing could divert them from the regular and faithful performace of the pieties enjoined b ythe Church

Mark Twain

#80. You might as well laugh at yourself,
everyone else is.

B.J. Neblett