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

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

Satire is focused bitterness.
Leo Rosten

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

Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful.
Molly Ivins

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

Satire is what closes on Saturday night.
George S. Kaufman

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

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

The Irish and British, they love satire, it's a large part of the culture.
Ben Nicholson

The journey of your first movie is not just beyond belief it can be truly beyond satire.
Yahoo Serious

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tomorrow is a satire on today, And shows its weakness.
Edward Young

Verse satire indeed is entirely our own.
Quintilian

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