Les Voyages De Gulliver
1726
Les Voyages De Gulliver
1726
Translated by Nicolas-Marc Desfontaines
The great prose satire of the English language, a book so viciously intelligent it was once burned publicly in Shanghai. Swift imagined a ship's surgeon tumbling through strange lands, each voyage a funhouse mirror held up to European society. In Lilliput, he towers over a nation of pygmies whose petty court intrigues mirror the absurdity of real empires. In Brobdingnag, he is the curiosity, a tiny man inspected by giants who find humanity contemptible. The flying island of Laputa skewers the scientists and projectors of the Royal Society, dreamers so lost in abstraction they neglect their starving countryside. And in the final voyage, Swift delivers his darkest vision: the Houyhnhnms, rational horses, and the Yahoos, brutal ape-like creatures who uncannily resemble humanity. The comedy never relents, but beneath it lies a misanthropy so total it became prophetic. A savage, funny, unsettling masterpiece that disguises itself as a boy's adventure story.
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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
