Gulliver's Travels into Several Remote Regions of the World
Gulliver's Travels into Several Remote Regions of the World
Swift's masterpiece is far darker and sharper than the watered-down adventures usually marketed to children. What begins as a rollicking travel narrative quickly becomes one of English literature's most vicious dissections of human folly. Lemuel Gulliver, a ship's surgeon, stumbles through four increasingly unsettling worlds: he dominates Lilliput's tiny empire, then finds himself a performing curiosity in Brobdingnag; he encounters Laputa's impractical philosophers, their heads so immersed in abstract calculation that they neglect their starving countryside; finally, in the land of the Houyhnhnms, he discovers intelligent horses who view humanity as the Yahoo species, brutish and repulsive. Each voyage inverts perspective until the familiar looks strange and the strange reveals the familiar. Swift targets science, politics, monarchy, and humanity itself with devastating precision. The final section, where Gulliver cannot bear the sight of his own family, remains genuinely disturbing. This is not a cheerful adventure but a corrosive, often funny, always unsettling inquiry into what we are and what we pretend not to be.
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“Every man desires to live long, but no man wishes to be old.””
— Jonathan Swift
“I cannot but conclude that the Bulk of your Natives, to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth.””
— Jonathan Swift
“Undoubtedly, philosophers are in the right when they tell us that nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison.””
— Jonathan Swift
“The tiny Lilliputians surmise that Gulliver's watch may be his god, because it is that which, he admits, he seldom does anything without consulting.””
— Jonathan Swift
“And he gave it for his opinion, "that whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.””
— Jonathan Swift
“Difference in opinions has cost many millions of lives: for instance, whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh; whether the juice of a certain berry be blood or wine.””
— Jonathan Swift
“This made me reflect, how vain an attempt it is for a man to endeavor to do himself honor among those who are out of all degree of equality or comparison with him.””
— Jonathan Swift
“... a wife should be always a reasonable and agreeable companion, because she cannot always be young.””
— Jonathan Swift
“Judges... are picked out from the most dextrous lawyers, who are grown old or lazy, and having been biased all their lives against truth or equity, are under such a fatal necessity of favoring fraud, perjury and oppression, that I have known several of them to refuse a large bribe from the side where justice lay, rather than injure the faculty by doing any thing unbecoming their nature in office.””
— Jonathan Swift
