John Adams Quotes

Hindsight is good, foresight is better; but second sight is best of all.

Jesters do often prove prophets.

Humor brings insight and tolerance. Irony brings a deeper and less friendly understanding.

Facetiousness is allowable when it is the most proper instrument of exposing things apparently base and vile to due contempt.

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

His foe was folly and his weapon wit.

It is difficult not to write satire.

There are some persons in this world, who, unable to give better proof of being wise, take a strange delight in showing what they think they have sagaciously read in mankind by uncharitable suspicions of them.

Who is the wise man? He who sees what's going to be born.

Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.

The world values the seer above all men

If life were fair, Dan Quayle would be making a living asking, "Do you want fries with that?

Comedy actually works best when you're living in an OK world, and you are pointing out the hypocrisy in apathy.

I started out making fun of comedy. Then I became the thing I was making fun of.

The minute you're laughing, some people will say you're laughing at people.

In general satire, every man perceives A slight attack, yet neither fears nor grieves.

Oh, for a pin that would puncture pretension!

Old women can see through walls.

When dunces are satiric, I take it for a panegyric.

Mock mockers after that That would not lift a hand maybe To help good, wise or great To bar that foul storm out, for we Traffic in mockery.

Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.

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.

Ridicule is the tribute paid to the genius by the mediocrities.

Bad times for the Republic are great times for satire.

If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it.