Social Satire Quotes

The court jester had the right to say the most outrageous things to the king. Everything was permitted during carnival, even the songs that the Roman legionnaires would sing, calling Julius Caesar 'queen,' alluding, in a very transparent way, to his real, or presumed, homosexual escapades.

I'm not just gonna go after the black Jesse Jackson they all want to make fun of, but I know the wrong people are gonna laugh at that. I don't want to play to that crowd. I don't.

Loathsome hordes dark swarms of worms that emerge from the narrow crevices of their holes when the sun is high, preferring to cover the villainous faces with hair rather than their private parts and surrounding areas with clothes.

Anybody can reach anywhere from five to 15 million people weekly making a president look like an idiot, as I did back then, or Tina Fey did with Sarah Palin... You're always preaching to the choir one way or the other.

In fact, to gull a fool seems to me an exploit worthy of a witty man.

Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague.

There is no character, howsoever good and fine, but it can be destroyed by ridicule

For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors and laugh at them in our turn?

I begin with the principle that all men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this.

I have seen the day, when, if a man made himself ridiculous, the world would laugh at him. But now, everything that is mean, disgusting, and absurd, pleases them but so much the better!

Laughter tends to mock the pompous and the pretentious; all man's boastful gadding about, all his pretty pomps, his hoary customs, his wornout creeds, changing the glitter of them into the dullest hue of lead.

Whatever helps you sleep is my opinion on the subject, and that's what I like about the western world's most popular religion, it has helped put so many people to sleep, although most of them permanently and without their approval.

To the extent that there is anything properly identifiable as dignity in our society today, our present writers of comedy would be inclined to treat it as a proper object of ridicule.

Why can't these American women stay in their own country? They are always telling us that it is the paradise for women. It is. That is the reason why, like Eve, they are so excessively anxious to get out of it.

The cultural influences in our country are like the floo floo bird. I am referring to the peculiar and especial bird who always flew backward. To keep the wind out of its eyes? No. Just because it didn't give a darn where it was going, but just had to see where it had been.

Tis the established custom [in Vienna] for every lady to have two husbands, one that bears the name, and another that performs the duties.

In England, justice is open to all - like the Ritz Hotel.

His jest will savour but of shallow wit, When thousands weep, more than did laugh at it.

In the '50s and '60s, a family's first child went into the priesthood, the second went into the military, and the third child was an idiot and wound up in advertising.

I waited patiently - years - for the pendulum to swing the other way, for men to start reading Jane Austen, learn how to knit, pretend to love cosmos, organize scrapbook parties, and make out with each other while we leer. And then we'd say, Yeah, he's a Cool Guy.

Christians get trees. Jews get bushes. To stay in good standing with the Tribe, you've got to refer to a Christmas tree as a Hanukkah bush.

'America is such a great country, we have fat poor people.' It's one of those jokes that doesn't hit people right away, because it's so prevalent that we don't get it.

Every nation ridicules other nations, and all are right.