Gulliver's Travels (Swift, Jonathan)

... fortune, whose shoulders are broader and stronger than those of a ministry.

For having strictly examined all the persons of great name in the courts of princes for a hundred years past, I found how the world had been misled by prositute writers, to ascribe the greatest exploits in war to cowards, the wisest counsel to fools, sincerity to flatterers, Roman virtue to betrayers of their country, piety to atheists, chastity to sodomites, truth to informers.