Top 130 Satire Quotes

Everybody should read ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ by Kurt Vonnegut. This book is about the hypocrisy of war, told in satire, and is hard-hitting and truthful.

Satire is, by definition, offensive. It is meant to make us feel uncomfortable. It is meant to make us scratch our heads, think, do a double-take, and then think again.

Satire is a form of social control, it’s what you do. It’s not personal. It’s a job.

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!

Good satire comes from anger. It comes from a sense of injustice, that there are wrongs in the world that need to be fixed. And what better place to get that well of venom and outrage boiling than a newsroom, because you’re on the front lines.

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

Mike Judge is my Jonathan Swift, and I say that because I don’t know any other satirists. But the problem with satire is that it’s so easily misinterpreted.

In a satire, you need foolishness.

I never really considered ‘Quantum & Woody’ a comedic book or a funny book. I never thought of it as a satire.

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 human person, so I do have some sort of compassion for even the people I’m mocking. But at the end of the day, I’m the little guy taking on the big guy. That to me is not bullying. That’s satire.

In the old days of literature, only the very thick-skinned – or the very brilliant – dared enter the arena of literary criticism. To criticise a person’s work required equal measures of erudition and wit, and inferior critics were often the butt of satire and ridicule.

The idea of 24-hour news, if you really step back, is pretty insane. Just even saying ’24-hour news’ almost has satire laced in it.

The sole purpose of a crown is to make anyone not wearing one feel like an insignificant pauper. They’re obscene to the point of satire.

Fools are my theme, let satire be my song.

Satire of satire tends to be self-canceling, and deliberate shock tactics soon lose their ability to shock, especially when they’re too deliberate.

There is a satire that exists in ‘My Arm,’ but there is also an honoring of some of the stronger ideas that I’ve raided from visual art.

The mark of a really great satire is its ability to seem prophetic, and I think that the television culture that film predicted really came true in the age of reality television and is a testament to how great it really is.

Political satire became obsolete when they awarded Henry Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize.

A lot of French comedy is satire.

‘Post 9/11 Blues’ is an observational satire about the surreal circus of fear at that time. It’s a generational thing.

On the other side of that coin, and far outweighing it, is the fact that I’ve been able to use genre of Fantasy/Horror and express my opinion, talk a little about society, do a little bit of satire and that’s been great, man. A lot of people don’t have that platform.

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

If you write satire, the guilty pleasure these days is that there’s just so much material about. On the other hand, if you have a family it can be depressing.

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 doesn’t effect change.

I think you’re born with a comedy gene, and you can’t teach timing, and you can’t teach satire, pathos.

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.

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.

Occasionally, the horrors of life in North Korea do show up in our American satire.

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

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.

I only aim at the powerful. When satire is aimed at the powerless, it is not only cruel – it’s vulgar.

You can’t debate satire. Either you get it or you don’t.

‘Veep’ is a great satire of democracy.

I found out recently that my ‘Good News’ show has a big following in North Korea and the Vatican City! Who knew Kim Jong-un and the Pope liked fast-paced satire?

But in terms of satire and comedy, our biggest and earliest influence was Mad magazine.

Satire is focused bitterness.

I liked ‘Repo Man.’ Satire.

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!

I was very involved in political satire, and I’d been writing parody for ‘Mad’ and ‘National Lampoon,’ so I made up some strange story about Gerald Ford.

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

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.

I would play hooky from school and spend all day in the movie theaters. Consequently, I learned satire in all its subtle forms.

If all you have is satire, your show will close. Even if all you have is comedy, your show will close. The hardest thing is not making people laugh: the hardest thing is building an emotional story. Any child can make a group of adults laugh.

It can take the uninitiated a minute to realize that ‘Gangnam Style’ is satire.

By the very nature of satire or parody, you have to love and respect your target and respect it enough to understand every aspect of it, so you can more effectively make fun of it.

If you’re going to get into social criticism with absurdity and satire, you can’t be politically correct when you do that.

I love ‘Glee.’ 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 okay to cry.

Satire also allows you to make fun of every different aspect. It allows you to make fun of both sides. It allows you to make fun of everything, really, so you can do it in a harmless way.

I wrote an ITV drama in the 1960s, a satire on management theory that starred Leonard Rossiter. I’m also a poet and have had work in the ‘Spectator.’

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.

I love the satire and skewering of comedy writing.

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.

There is no place for a person like me in a world that only takes itself seriously. Satire is so necessary but fairly ineffective.

Even for natives, French satire is rarely laugh-out-loud funny. Its unspoken punch line is typically that things have gone irrevocably wrong, and the government is to blame.

I think it’s legitimate to do satire. If you’re going to write a book of satire on Marilyn Monroe or Madonna, you’re not going to get their permission, because you’re going to make fun of them!

I think that there’s a real appetite for opinion-driven satire, not just generic making jokes about what’s in the news but actually point-of-view-driven stuff.

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.

Look, I don’t have the millions of dollars that Exxon has. But I’ve got comedy. I’ve got satire. I’ve got stars.

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.

What’s great about ‘The Daily Show’ is I can use satire and push the envelope. I couldn’t do that anywhere else. Even if I was a journalist.

There are thousands of ways to make people laugh – satire, black comedy, slapstick.

Drag is pastiche and parody and satire. Drag queens are never meant to be stars. We make fun of stars. Drag queens are the people that ‘point’ at the star.

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.