Jonathan Swift set great store by good manners and basic decency. As a satirist he saw it as his role to attack human weaknesses and vices. However, it was never his aim to attack or embarrass individuals. He preferred the approach of criticising the fault rather than the person.
This approach is summed in the first lines quoted below. They are a kind living epitaph, written by Swift himself, indicating how he would like to be remembered after his death.
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Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse. Whoever makes the fewest people uneasy is the best bred in the room.
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A nice man is a man of nasty ideas.
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One of the very best rules of conversation is to never, say anything which any of the company wish had been left unsaid.
Nothing is so great an example of bad manners as flattery. If you flatter all the company, you please none; If you flatter only one or two, you offend the rest.
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Conversation is but carving!
Give no more to every guest
Than he’s able to digest.
Give him always of the prime,
And but little at a time.
Carve to all but just enough,
Let them neither starve nor stuff,
And that you may have your due,
Let your neighbour carve for you.
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If a proud man makes me keep my distance, the comfort is that he keeps his at the same time.
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Pride, ill nature, and want of sense are the three great sources of ill manners; without some one of these defects, no man will behave himself ill for want of experience, or what, in the language of fools, is called knowing the world.
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Argument, as usually managed, is the worst sort of conversation, as in books it is generally the worst sort of reading.
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