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Why should we fear; and what? The laws?
  They all are armed in virtue's cause;
    And aiming at the self-same end,
      Satire is always virtue's friend.
      - Charles Churchill, Ghost (bk. III, l. 943)

Unless a love of virtue light the flame,
  Satire is, more than those he brands, to blame;
    He hides behind a magisterial air
      He own offences, and strips others' bare.
      - William Cowper, Charity (l. 490)

The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.
      - James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

It is difficult not to write satire.
  [Lat., Difficile est satiram non scribere.]
      - Juvenal (Decimus Junius Juvenal), Satires (I, 29)

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

Men are more satirical from vanity than from malice.
      - Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld, Maxims (no. 508)

Satire should, like a polished razor keen,
  Wound with a touch that's scarcely felt or seen.
    Thine is an oyster knife, that hacks and hews;
      The rage but not the talent to abuse.
      - Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,
        To the Imitator of the First Satire of Horace,
        (Pope)

I wear my Pen as others do their Sword.
  To each affronting sot I meet, the word
    Is Satisfaction: straight to thrusts I go,
      And pointed satire runs him through and through.
      - John Oldham, Satire upon a Printer (l. 35)

Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,
  And without sneering teach the rest to sneer;
    Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike,
      Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike;
        Alike reserv'd to blame, or to commend,
          A tim'rous foe, and a suspicious friend.
      - Alexander Pope, Prologue to Satires (l. 201)

Satire or sense, alas! Can Sporus feel?
  Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?
      - Alexander Pope, Prologue to Satires (l. 307),
        (Sporus is Lord John Hervey)

There are, to whom my satire seems too bold;
  Scarce to wise Peter complaisant enough,
    And something said of Chartres much too rough.
      - Alexander Pope, Second Book of Horace
         (satire I, l. 2)

Satire's my weapon, but I'm too discreet
  To run amuck and tilt at all I meet.
      - Alexander Pope, Second Book of Horace
         (satire I, l. 71)

It is a pretty mocking of the life.
      - William Shakespeare, The Life of Timon of Athens
         (Painter at I, i)

It is as hard to satirize well a man of distinguished vices, as to praise well a man of distinguished virtues.
      - Jonathan Swift

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

Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.
  [Fr., La satire ment sur les gens de lettres pendant leur vie, et l'eloge ment apres leur mort.]
      - Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire),
        Lettre a Bordes

Susanna Carlisle: His cartoonist's sensibility followed in the tradition of nineteenth-century French artist, political and social satirist Honore' Daumier. The essence of Daumier's satire was his ability to interpret mental folly in terms of physical absurdity. Both Daumier and Price were known for their radical stance and the freedom with which they used materials.

 

Source: (Boston satirical political art exhibit at Art Institute of Boston)

http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/2aa/2aa323.htm
"Mightier than the Sword, Political Satire, Caricature, and Cartoon on the Presidency, Presidents and Presidential Elections" opens at The Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University, 700 Beacon Street, on Monday, November 13, 2000 and continues through January 21, 2001.
The exhibition highlights the work of artists Edward Sorel of The New Yorker, Jules Feiffer of the Village Voice, Robert Grossman of The Atlantic Monthly, Seymour Chwast of Push Pin Studios in New York City, Jeff Danziger of The Los Angeles Times and Dan Wasserman of The Boston Globe.
"Those engaged in the profession of political satire and cartoon, whatever their own political views, are the prime exemplars of freedom of the press," explains curator Bonnell Robinson. In 1830, the French government fueled a revolution, in part, because they tried to suppress visual satire and caricature. Among those who survived -- to attack again -- was Honoré Daumier. Today, Feiffer, Sorel, Danziger, Chwast, Wasserman, and Grossman are among our finest masters of satire and cartoon to continue this tradition of political commentary - -as they unmask and lampoon the foibles and follies of our politicians."
Jon Swan, author and journalist, in his introduction to the exhibition brochure writes, "While satire is first and foremost a literary form, the impulse to puncture and deflate, to indict and excoriate finds expression in all the arts, particularly the pictorial. Hogarth's "The Rake's Progress," is a memorable example; Daumier's depictions elf predatory lawyers and a generally avaricious bourgeois society have lost neither their relevance nor their bite. While written satire may be gasping its last -- a washed-up shark still snapping its jaws -- the impulse that gave us a rich literature of wrath and righteous indignation lives on in the work of such masterful practitioners as Ronald Searle, David Levine, Edward Sorel and Arnold Roth. It should be noted, however, that, fewer and fewer magazines care to, or dare to, showcase satirical artwork. It might offend!"
Jeff Danziger's motto is "the world is too serious not to laugh at it."

Edward Sorel (born 1929) once said, "I wake up angry and go to sleep angry. Essentially, my cartoons are a kind of therapy to keep myself from going crazy at the insanity and injustice in the world."