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Satire is a lesson, parody is a game. -- Vladimir Nabokov
Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful. -- Molly Ivins
Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own. -- Jonathan Swift
Satire is tragedy plus time. -- Lenny Bruce
Praise undeserved, is satire in disguise. -- Alexander Pope
Satire is what closes Saturday night. -- Juvenal
Satire is moral outrage transformed into comic art. -- Philip Roth
Fools are my theme, let satire be my song. -- Lord Byron
Satire is dependent on strong beliefs, and on strong beliefs wounded. -- Anita Brookner
Satire or sense, alas! Can Sporus feel? Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel? -- Alexander Pope
Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die. -- Voltaire
Satire should, like a polished razor keen, Wound with a touch that's scarcely felt or seen. -- Mary Wortley Montagu
People say satire is dead. It's not dead; it's alive and living in the White House. -- Robin Williams
Satire's my weapon, but I'm too discreet to run amok and tilt at all I meet. -- Alexander Pope
You can't make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you're doing is recording it. -- Art Buchwald
Unless a love of virtue light the flame, Satire is, more than those he brands, to blame; He hides behind a magisterial air He own offences, and strips others' bare. -- William Cowper
It is difficult not to write satire. -- Juvenal
Satire is what closes on Saturday night. -- George S. Kaufman
Tomorrow is a satire on today, And shows its weakness. -- Edward Young
If satire is to be effective, the audience must be aware of the thing satirized. -- Gore Vidal
It is as hard to satirize well a man of distinguished vices, as to praise well a man of distinguished virtues. -- Jonathan Swift
Satire of satire tends to be self-canceling, and deliberate shock tactics soon lose their ability to shock, especially when they're too deliberate. -- Herb Caen
A satire should expose nothing but what is corrigible, and should make a due discrimination between those that are and those that are not the proper objects of it. -- Joseph Addison
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
Satire also allows you to make fun of every different aspect. It allows you to make fun of both sides. It allows you to make fun of everything, really, so you can do it in a harmless way. -- Neill Blomkamp
Should a writer single out and point his raillery at particular persons, or satirize the miserable, he might be sure of pleasing a great part of his readers, but must be a very ill man if he could please himself. -- Joseph Addison
It seems like there's a lot of people who just do not understand satire. They think it's weird. There's people who just don't understand you portray something or just explore a character, it means you're condoning it, saying this is the way to live. -- Mike Judge
Satire is focused bitterness. -- Leo Rosten
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Satire is the disease of art. -- Nicolas Chamfort
Kennedy didn't beat Nixon. Satire beat Nixon. -- Chris Rock
Satire that the censor understands is rightly censored. -- Karl Kraus
Satire always benefits when evil and stupidity collide. -- Gary Shteyngart
Satire does not look pretty upon a tombstone. -- Charles Lamb
Satire is born of the cities it denounces. -- Mason Cooley
Satire is an abuse of wit. It corrects few evils. -- Christian Nestell Bovee
Satire is a kind of poetry in which human vices are reprehended. -- John Dryden
Satire, like conscience, reminds us of what we often wish to forget. -- Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington
Satire, being levelled at all, is never resented for an offence by any. -- Jonathan Swift
Satire that is seasonable and just is often more effectual than law or gospel. -- Josh Billings
Satire among the Romans, but not among the Greeks, was a bitter invective poem. -- John Dryden
Satire recoils whenever charged too high; round your own fame the fatal splinters fly. -- Edward Young
Satire is a form of social control, it's what you do. It's not personal. It's a job. -- Garry Trudeau
Satire chooses and knows no objects. It arises by fleeing from them and their forcing themselves upon it. -- Karl Kraus
Satire has been a sanctuary historically monopolized by progressives, originally used as a discreet tool against Western religious fundamentalism. -- Maajid Nawaz
Satire exists for the purpose of killing the social being [for the sake of] the true individual, the real human being. -- D. H. Lawrence
Satire, though it may exaggerate the vice it lashes, is not justified in creating it in order that it may be lashed. -- Anthony Trollope
Satire is not a social dynamite. But it is a social indicator: it shows that new men are knocking at the door. -- Jacob Bronowski
Satire about any and all professionals with a special vocabulary has been a staple of fiction and popular ridicule since the 18th century. -- Paul Fry
Satire is people as they are; romanticism, people as they would like to be; realism, people as they seem with their insides left out. -- Dawn Powell
Charlie Hebdo: Satire was the father of true political freedom, born in the 18th century; the scourge of bigots and tyrants. Sing its praises. -- Simon Schama
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. -- E. L. Doctorow
Satire is tragedy plus time. You give it enough time, the public, the reviewers will allow you to satirize it. Which is rather ridiculous, when you think about it. -- Lenny Bruce
Satire dramatizes better than any other use of it, the inherent contradiction of free speech that it functions best when what is being said is at its most outrageous. -- Tony Hendra
Satire is fascinating stuff. It's deadly serious, and when politics begin to break down, there is a drift towards satire, because it's the only thing that makes any sense. -- Ben Nicholson
Satire is a composition of salt and mercury; and it depends upon the different mixture and preparation of those ingredients, that it comes out a noble medicine, or a rank poison. -- Francis Jeffrey, Lord Jeffrey
The critics try to intellectualize my material. There's no satire involved. Satire is a concept that can only be understood by adults. My stuff is straight, for people of all ages. -- Andy Kaufman
The show is a satire, which gives us freedom to do anything we want. Satire is the magic word that wipes away any culpability. The media is jealous of this freedom. -- Rob Corddry
Satire has a great big glaring target. If successful, it blasts a great big hole in the center. Directness there must be and singleness of aim: it is all aim, all trajectory. -- Wyndham Lewis
Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful. I only aim at the powerful. When satire is aimed at the powerless, it is not only cruel -- it's vulgar. -- Molly Ivins
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
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, -- Joe Randazzo
Satire is meant to have teeth; satire is meant to be dangerous. But it also happens to be fun because subversion and telling the right kind of people to go to hell is supposed to feel good. -- John Cusack
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. -- Jonathan Swift
Satire is, indeed, the only sort of composition in which the Latin poets whose works have come down to us were not mere imitators of foreign models; and it is therefore the sort of composition in which they have never been excelled. -- Thomas B. Macaulay
Satire must not be a kind of superfluous ill will, but ill will from a higher point of view. Ridiculous man, divine God. Or else, hatred against the bogged-down vileness of average man as against the possible heights that humanity might attain. -- Paul Klee
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. -- Justin Simien
If we ban whatever offends any group in our diverse society, we will soon have no art, no culture, no humor, no satire. Satire is by its nature offensive. So is much art and political discourse. The value of these expressions far outweighs their risk. -- Erica Jong
Satire is used for political purposes all the time, but obviously there's a time and a place. I think in the current climate, it can be very difficult to speak your mind, but sometimes, I believe, we're all in danger and I think this discussion needs to be widened. -- George Michael
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. -- Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Verse satire indeed is entirely our own. -- Quintilian
You can't debate satire. Either you get it or you don't. -- Michael Moore
Status is always ripe for satire, status is always good for comedy. -- Stephen Colbert
The Irish and British, they love satire, it's a large part of the culture. -- Ben Nicholson
It is hard for power to enjoy or incorporate humour and satire in its system of control. -- Dario Fo
If you're going to get into social criticism with absurdity and satire, you can't be politically correct when you do that. -- John Cusack
All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire. -- Theodor Adorno
I try and write satire that's well-intentioned. But those intentions have to be hidden. It can't be completely clear, and that's what makes it comedy. -- Bo Burnham
There is a place in this world for satire, but there is a time when satire ends and intolerance and bigotry towards religious beliefs of others begins. -- Isaac Hayes
If you're going to give people 20 minutes of news satire, you've also got to give them Tiffani-Amber Thiessen or you're going to have rioting in the streets. -- Jon Stewart
By the very nature of satire or parody, you have to love and respect your target and respect it enough to understand every aspect of it, so you can more effectively make fun of it. -- T. J. Miller
Now, Richard Pryor was unique. Many misunderstood his humor. He lit up the hallway, but they didn't understand his use of profanity. He didn't use it just to be using it; he used it in the context of his satire. -- Bill Cosby
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. -- Patrick Stump
Good satire comes from anger. It comes from a sense of injustice, that there are wrongs in the world that need to be fixed. And what better place to get that well of venom and outrage boiling than a newsroom, because you're on the front lines. -- Carl Hiaasen
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
Popular culture bombards us with examples of animals being humanized for all sorts of purposes, ranging from education to entertainment to satire to propaganda. Walt Disney, for example, made us forget that Mickey is a mouse, and Donald a duck. George Orwell laid a cover of human societal ills over a population of livestock. -- Frans de Waal
Hollywood is horrible... it's beyond satire. -- Yahoo Serious
Good satire hopefully provides thought-provoking conversation. -- Lizz Winstead
One man's pointlessness is another's barbed satire. -- Franklin P. Adams
Praise to the undeserving is severe satire. -- Benjamin Franklin
Pornography is a satire on human pretensions. -- Angela Carter
I like to write a lot of satire. -- Earl King
Wherever there is objective truth, there is satire. -- Wyndham Lewis
I love the satire and skewering of comedy writing. -- Kristin Gore
Social satire has been around since people have been around. -- David Walliams
I came to Hollywood originally writing comedy and writing satire. -- Stephen Gaghan
satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality. -- Barbara Tuchman
Political satire became obsolete when they awarded Henry Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize. -- Tom Lehrer
Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize. -- Tom Lehrer
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Wickedly funny to read and morally bracing as only good satire can be. -- William Styron
As long as there is satire, the poet is, as it were, particeps criminis. -- Henry David Thoreau
The Irish and British, they love satire, its a large part of the culture. -- Ben Nicholson
I never wanted to do political satire because it seems too surface to me. -- Tracey Ullman
In general satire, every man perceives A slight attack, yet neither fears nor grieves. -- George Crabbe
If you have to explain satire to someone, you might as well give up. -- Barry Humphries
How do we get a pantomime cow on set. Jeez, the rigours of satire. -- Mel Smith
I like the George Romero films, which were really great, social satire movies; really twisted. -- John Cusack
I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire -- Salman Rushdie
Occasionally, the horrors of life in North Korea do show up in our American satire. -- Jennifer Armintrout
But in terms of satire and comedy, our biggest and earliest influence was Mad magazine. -- Jerry Zucker
Producing satire is kind of hopeless because of the literacy rate of the American public. -- Frank Zappa
The feathered arrow of satire has oft been wet with the heart's blood of its victims. -- Benjamin Disraeli
I sometimes think humor and satire are more effective techniques for expressing social statements than direct comment. -- Kristin Hunter
Friendly satire may be compared to a fine lancet, which gently breathes a vein for health's sake. -- Samuel Richardson
The journey of your first movie is not just beyond belief it can be truly beyond satire. -- Yahoo Serious
It's a great time to be doing political satire when the world is on a knife edge. -- John Oliver
Of all debts, men are least willing to pay their taxes; what a satire this is on government. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life serves up satire. Unfortunately. Or fortunately. I don't know. You have to reel it in to drama. -- Stephen Gaghan
Humor is essential to a successful tactician, for the most potent weapons known to mankind are satire and ridicule. -- Saul Alinsky

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