Top 400 Satire Quotes & Sayings - Page 5
Explore popular Satire quotes.
Last updated on April 21, 2025.
In TV writing, Armando Iannucci's satire 'The Thick of It' is brilliant - equal parts hysterically funny, terrifyingly believable, and Oh-my-God-I-can't-believe-he-actually-said-that - and it's got the most satisfyingly creative insults ever.
I never really considered 'Quantum & Woody' a comedic book or a funny book. I never thought of it as a satire.
‘Respect for religion’ has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion.’ Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.
I have never knowingly, I swear to God, written satire. The word connotes exaggeration of the foibles of mankind. To me, mankind just has foibles. You don't have to push it!
Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.
We are almost in a time beyond jokes, beyond satire. When the Trump era is called the 'post-truth' period, then this is the greatest joke of all, albeit quite depressing.
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.
People keep saying you can't satirize Trump because he's beyond satire, but it's not difficult to just let him out and let him walk upon the stage and say his own words.
Politics is a thing that is kind of the same over and over and over again. But we have to find new ways of poking fun at it and letting the air out of people and satirizing things that are worthy of satire.
Rush Limbaugh's pathetic abuse of logic, his absurd pomposity, his relentless self-promotion, his ridiculous ego - now those, friends, are appropriate targets for satire.
There's certainly satire written about techies, but it's so snarky and snide and doesn't treat him as a whole person. The people I worked with at Twitter - they're very analytical, but they're also deep and thoughtful - I feel like they deserved a charismatic spokesperson.
We never dealt with satire or suggestive material. Although some of our films were broad parodies or burlesques of popular dramatic themes, there was no conscious attempt at being either sarcastic or offensive.
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.
I believe that pop culture is just, like, so ready for 'Watchmen.' We tried so hard to ride that wave between satire and reality, and all the things that make you still care about the character, but you don't miss the commentary about them.
But satire, ever moral, ever new, Delights the reader and instructs him, too. She, if good sense refine her sterling page, Oft shakes some rooted folly of the age.
Obviously, I'm a fan of satire. I'd debate anyone, but it would have to be the actual person. That would be my only hesitation about debating Stephen Colbert. If he were playing a character, it wouldn't really work.
If you're an activist trying to do something important, I salute you. Most of us just give ourselves ethical brownie points for watching Channel 2 instead of Channel 3, like characters in a broad dystopian satire.
I cry all the time when I watch 'Glee' because I don't know if it's satire or melodrama and that makes me feel like the writing is aware of itself, and that makes it OK to cry.
Organizations like the CIA and the FBI are still kind of supermen, kind of SS troops: We're blond and the best and everyone else should be incinerated. They don't know right from wrong. That's what makes a satire of these government bureaus really funny.
Though folly, robed in purple, shines, Though vice exhausts Peruvian mines, Yet shall they tremble and turn pale When satire wields her mighty flail.
Pulp Fiction is a, uh, gritty, urban satire. Pump Friction is a uh-uh, a bunch of uh, dudes and ladies having dirty sex.
Social satire has been around since people have been around.
I don't know that you can do it as a satire. I mean, the business is crazy enough as it is. It's like doing Wag The Dog - we took a thing that was almost completely absurd on one level, and then ultimately those things came about.
Wyndham Lewis is basically a pessimist, thinking of human beings as doomed animals or determinist machines. His theory of satire is based on this view, and he finds plenty of evidence to support it in contemporary practice.
Among the writers of antiquity there are none who instruct us more openly in the manners of their respective times in which they lived than those who have employed themselves in satire, under whatever dress it may appear.
A lot of people tend to glorify the role of satire and comedians. They put them up as role models, as fighters for the truth and against tyranny, and I think that's overrated.
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.
I think the big lesson I've learned is that it's very hard to write satire in America because almost immediately, whatever you've thought of turns out to come true, or sometimes it already was true.
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.
It's a one-day story of a guy called Newton Kumar, and the backdrop is election: how the most powerful tool we have as citizens is vote but how we don't utilise it. We really don't give importance to it. It talks about democracy; it's a satire, a black comedy.
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.
I think comedy and satire are the strongest ways to deal with very serious themes and very painful themes.
Good satire is about attacking the powerful, and that tends to be more the purview of the left. Maybe there's something about the conservative mindset that confuses mean-spirited name-calling and insults with actual humor.
The reason I wrote political satire was because I thought it - politics - was important... that public policy was important. Then I transitioned into books, then into radio.
Pornographers are the enemies of women only because our contemporary ideology of pornography does not encompass the possibility of change, as if we were the slaves of history and not its makers. . . . Pornography is a satire on human pretensions.
I've never been much drawn towards satire of any kind. I don't like that style whereby you kind of stitch people up. But the deeper thing is that I just find these people so impressive and admirable.
An ideology critique that does not clearly accept its identity as satire can, however, easily be transformed from an instrument in the search for truth into one of dogmatism. All too often, it interferes with the capacity for dialogue instead of opening up new paths for it.
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.
Okay well - no that is a very real thing seven-year-olds asking for BlackBerrys and cell phones and things like that. And that's one of the things I love most about the show [The Starter Wife] is the social satire.
What a newspaper needs in its news, in its headlines, and on its editorial page is terseness, humor, descriptive power, satire, originality, good literary style, clever condensation and accuracy, accuracy, accuracy.
My biggest influence growing up was Mad magazine, which is a very text-heavy form of visual satire. I didn’t grow up wanting to draw donkeys and elephants with the names of politicians written across them.
Everyone understood [Charlie Hebdo], as people had understood for hundreds of years, knowing that Rabelaisian tradition of French satire, they knew how to read it. And they understood the kind of release from piety that it represented every week.
I would say probably Paris [Hilton]. Because to me that's her in character and she kind was always sort of winking at the camera. There was satire I think involved in what she was doing. I like to think there was.
When George Bush finally leaves the White House, the satire industry will briefly join the rest of the economy in recession. It will certainly be the end of an era.
Kaizad Gustad is quite crazy, and he has weird ideas, and 'Boom' is one such idea. It's a crazy film by a crazy guy. It's almost a satire, a black comedy.
It's supposed to feel good to throw a brick at the right people. There is a long tradition of naming and ridiculing and shaming and calling the villains what they are. Usually it was the artistocracy of the day and satire was the only way to speak truth to power.
As 'Possession' progresses, it seems less and less like the usual satire about academia and more like something by Jorge Luis Borges.
THE DYING GAUL is a Hollywood satire. But Hollywood is not the real subject matter here. My play uses that world of high-rolling big money - that crazy-making business - to examine a whole range of subjects.
Shelley Jackson's 'Half Life' is the textual equivalent of an installation, a multivocal, polymorphous, dialogic, dystopian satire wrapped around a murder mystery wrapped around a bildungsroman.
'Dear White People' started a conversation about race. It's such a difficult thing to talk about, especially in America because of our history. I love that you can confront it with humour and with satire.
Good satire goes beyond the specific point it’s trying to make and teaches you how to think critically. Even after your favorite cartoonist retires or [Stephen] Colbert wraps it up, you’re not left believing everything they’re telling you.
What a newspaper needs in its news, in its headlines, and on its editorial page is terseness, humor, descriptive power, satire, originality, good literary style, clever condensation, and accuracy, accuracy, accuracy!
I don't want to sound disingenuous here - controversy is obviously good for business, especially if your business is satire. And it does amplify the discussion - in my view, a good thing.
When satire flies abroad on falsehood's wing, Short is her life, and impotent her sting; But when to truth allied, the wound she gives Sinks deep, and to remotest ages lives.
The importance of satire is bringing more people to the table. There are a lot of average citizens who aren't interested in politics and would be more interested if it's brought to them in a comedic, funny, satirical way.
If an historian were to relate truthfully all the crimes, weaknesses, and disorders of mankind, his readers would take his work for satire rather than for history.
The most brilliant satire of all time was 'A Modest Proposal' by Jonathan Swift. You'll notice how everything got straightened out in Ireland within days of that coming out.
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.
People are always looking for something to hate on. If this is something for them to target and hate on, that's their thing. I look at it as satire.
Crime, horror, and satire each aim to reveal an ugly or uncomfortable truth: one that, after the reveal, will ensure we'll never be the same. The big difference between those genres being the effect they create.
