Quotes & Sayings About Satirists

I get very confused about being called a comedian, because when you say 'I'm a comedian,' people expect you to crack a joke. Maybe I use laughter and humour to make people think. I don't know what you call that - a humourist? A satirist? A pessimistic comedian? I don't know. Satirists can be very dark. — Bassem Youssef

That was what he wanted to tell his audience at Cambridge. He divided classical satirists into two classes - fierce men starving in garrets, and renouncing popularity and circulation to dwell in tubs, and calm good-livers "who tell amusingly the kind of truth that no one has ever denied." But for the present century the right spirit, he believed, was self-satire, the ability to see humor in the constant small defeats of life, and "the power to be startled by nothing, however extravagant." The subject, in the end, turned out to be more relevant than it had seemed, as anyone could have told who had heard Eddie and Wilfred laughing together. — Penelope Fitzgerald

It's funny because I think a lot of it is simply ... We've never considered ourselves satirists, but because we're on Comedy Central and because we're South Park on Comedy Central, we can do any topic we want. — Trey Parker

The misnomer is that satirists are pessimists, or even misanthropes, but usually it is just a way to unlock human potential. — Marietta Rodgers

There is scarce any passion so heartily decried by moralists and satirists, as AMBITION; and yet, methinks, ambition is not a vice but in a vicious mind: in a virtuous mind it is a virtue, and will be found to take its color from the character in which it is mixed. Ambition is a desire of superiority; and a man may become superior, either by making others less or himself greater. — Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke

I think the worst thing we can do is to concede to fanaticism its devotion, say. Well, you have to understand, these people are really fanatics, so we should back down from them. I think if journalists start doing that then they won't be practicing journalism. If satirists start doing that then they won't be practicing satire. — Adam Gopnik

Satirists, be careful. In the 1931 film by Rene Clair "Vive la Liberte" a song says, "Work is freedom." In 1940 the sign on the gates to Auschwitz said: "Arbeit macht frei. — Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

If the mystery can be reduced to one solution, it lies in a simple coincidence: Rimbaud's interest in his own work had survived the realization that the world would not be changed by verbal innovation. It did not survive the failure of all his adult relationships. He had always treated poems as a form of private communication. He gave his songs to chansonniers, his satires to satirists. Without a constant companion, he was writing in a void. — Graham Robb

There is nothing we can't do. So it's just the fact that we're doing topics like that that other people, especially network TV, won't touch, that we're satirists. — Trey Parker

The public is gullible ... If [many satirists are] making the same joke, that's the danger. Then there's a solidifying effect and it becomes a truth. — Bill Maher

Our most noted satirists are true columnists, and their opinions can be worth more than any well-documented expose. — Umberto Eco

Many artists and writers have used cannabis for creative stimulation - from the writers of the world's religious masterpieces to our most irreverent satirists. — Jack Herer

Satirists [10w]
I do best what satirists have always done ~
make enemies. — Beryl Dov

Satirists gain the applause of others through fear, not through love. — William Hazlitt

Satirists do expose their own ill nature. — Isaac Watts

Most satirists are indeed a public scourge; Their mildest physic is a farrier's purge; Their acrid temper turns, as soon as stirr'd, The milk of their good purpose all to curd. Their zeal begotten, as their works rehearse, By lean despair upon an empty purse. — William Cowper

American voters tend to make their decisions based on a variety of vectors. Professional political satirists employ rather more scientific criteria. Namely: who will provide us with better material over the next four years? — Christopher Buckley

I read the best works of some of the best satirists, and indeed best writers from the beginning of the Victorian era to about the 1960s. If you want to be a blacksmith, you go and watch the blacksmith working, and you work out what the blacksmith does. — Terry Pratchett