Quotes and Sayings about Satire
"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
(Related: Time, Public, Satire, Tragedy, Will)
"You can't make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you're doing is recording it."
- Art Buchwald
(Related: Satire, World)
"Fools are my theme, let satire be my song."
- Lord Byron
(Related: Fools, Satire, Song)
"Pornography is a satire on human pretensions."
- Angela Carter
(Related: Pornography, Satire)
"The trouble with most comedians who try to do satire is that they are essentially brash, noisy and indelicate people who have to use a sledge hammer to smash a butterfly."
- Imogene Coca
(Related: People, Comedians, Satire, Trouble)
"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
(Related: Freedom, Magic, Media, Satire, Want, Word)
"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
(Related: Absurdity, Criticism, Satire)
"I like the George Romero films, which were really great, social satire movies; really twisted."
- John Cusack
(Related: Movies, Satire)
"It struck me that working digitally with a small crew, I could lay out a general plan for Famous and hope for mistakes which would create something more than satire and something less than truthful reality."
- Griffin Dunne
(Related: Hope, Famous, Mistakes, Reality, Satire)
"The purpose of satire has been rightly stated as to strip off the veneer of comforting illusion and cosy half truth, and our job, as I see it, is to put it back again!"
- Michael Flanders
(Related: Truth, Purpose, Illusion, Job, Satire)
"It is hard for power to enjoy or incorporate humour and satire in its system of control."
- Dario Fo
(Related: Power, Control, Satire)
"We've managed to keep a spirit of fun, I guess, of urban satire and finding new and odd interesting angles to the ways of life to put on the stage."
- Adolph Green
(Related: Life, Fun, Satire, Spirit)
"There is a place in this world for satire, but there is a time when satire ends and intolerance and bigotry toward religious beliefs... begins."
- Isaac Hayes
(Related: Time, Beliefs, Bigotry, Intolerance, Religious, Satire, World)
"The modern form of things had begun to appeal to me, also (as material for satire) politics, and the lives of the great and little, high up in the social scale."
- Laurence Housman
(Related: Politics)
"Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful."
- Molly Ivins
(Related: Satire)
"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
(Related: People, Character, Satire, Saying)
"It is difficult not to write satire."
- Juvenal
(Related: Satire)
"Satire is what closes on Saturday night."
- George S. Kaufman
(Related: Night, Satire)
"For years, reality has been nipping at the heels of satire. Now, it's finally caught up. I don't need to make this stuff up."
- Paul Krassner
(Related: Now, Reality, Satire, Years)
"When you look at golf films before us they're all - garbage or satire. A lot of sports films tend to vilify the opposition. Where the opposition becomes this big angry monster, so big you can't beat him."
- Shia LaBeouf
(Related: Sports, Golf, Opposition, Satire)
"The British ballads became a new kind of form in their hand. And out of them came the blues, a new kind of song of commentary and satire, a song form which, after all, has become the main musical form of the whole human species."
- Alan Lomax
(Related: Ballads, Satire, Song)
"A sitcom isn't usually the right tool for satire."
- Chris Morris
(Related: Right, Satire)
"Satire is a lesson, parody is a game."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Satire)
"The Irish and British, they love satire, it's a large part of the culture."
- Ben Nicholson
(Related: Love, Culture, Irish, Satire)
"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
(Related: Politics, Satire, Sense)
"Conventional show-biz savvy held that Americans hated to be the objects of satire."
- Carroll O'Connor
(Related: Americans, Satire)
"Praise undeserved, is satire in disguise."
- Alexander Pope
(Related: Disguise, Praise, Satire)
"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
(Related: People, Realism, Satire)
"Verse satire indeed is entirely our own."
- Quintilian
(Related: Satire)
"Satire is focused bitterness."
- Leo Rosten
(Related: Bitterness, Satire)
"The journey of your first movie is not just beyond belief it can be truly beyond satire."
- Yahoo Serious
(Related: Belief, First, Journey, Satire)
"Hollywood is horrible... it's beyond satire."
- Yahoo Serious
(Related: Hollywood, Satire)
"Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own."
- Jonathan Swift
(Related: Satire)
"Comedy has to be done en clair. You can't blunt the edge of wit or the point of satire with obscurity. Try to imagine a famous witty saying that is not immediately clear."
- James Thurber
(Related: Comedy, Famous, Obscurity, Satire, Saying, Wit, Witty)
"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
(Related: Nature, Nothing, Satire, Will, World)
"I never wanted to do political satire because it seems too surface to me."
- Tracey Ullman
(Related: Satire)
"Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die."
- Voltaire
(Related: Men, Lies, Literary, Satire)
"We pay homage to the people who came before, doing satires, like Mel Brooks; we're just carrying the torch."
- Shawn Wayans
(Related: People, Brooks)
"People say satire is dead. It's not dead; it's alive and living in the White House."
- Robin Williams
(Related: People, Living, Satire)
"Tomorrow is a satire on today, And shows its weakness."
- Edward Young
(Related: Satire, Today, Tomorrow, Weakness)
"I think up until the point when we started in the business, which was in the early '70s, most of the humor was political. The smart humor was political satire."
- David Zucker
(Related: Humor, Business, Satire)
"Our fathers were actually business partners in the same real-estate firm, and we got together and thought, How can we get a movie together and get distribution and create a new movie genre? We started by making satires of commercials."
- David Zucker
(Related: Business, Thought, Fathers)
"But in terms of satire and comedy, our biggest and earliest influence was Mad magazine."
- Jerry Zucker
(Related: Comedy, Influence, Satire)