Jonathan Swift — "Promises and pie-crusts are made to be broken."
Promises and pie-crusts are made to be broken.
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More from Jonathan Swift
"The only way to retrieve the credit of the nation, is to pay off the public debts."
"What they do in heaven we are ignorant of; what they do not we are told expressly: that they neither marry, nor are given in marriage."
"Ambition often puts men upon doing the meanest offices; so climbing is performed in the same posture with creeping."
"Censorship is the tool of those who have to hide what they think and what they do."
"Thus Dædalus and Ovid too, That man's a blockhead have confessed, Powel and Stretch the hint pursue; Life is the farce, the world a jest."
About Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
Anglo-Irish satirist and Dean of Dublin's St Patrick's Cathedral whose Gulliver's Travels (1726) and A Modest Proposal (1729) are the canonical English-language satires. Closely associated with Alexander Pope (Scriblerus Club poet and collaborator) and John Gay (Beggar's Opera author and satirical contemporary). For an intellectual contrast, see Daniel Defoe, English Whig journalist and Robinson Crusoe author (1660-1731) — Defoe's Crusoe (1719) celebrates Enlightenment self-reliance and the colonial-mercantile project; Swift's Gulliver (1726) systematically dismantles every form of human pretension Defoe celebrated. The cleanest Augustan Whig-vs-Tory literary pairing — optimistic-empirical vs misanthropic-satirical.