Utopia
1516
Utopia
1516
Thomas More invented a word that would outlast empires. In this sparkling 1516 dialogue, the traveler Raphael Hythloday describes an island where no one owns anything, everyone works six-hour shifts, and elected officials rotate through office like sensible people. War is despised. Prisons are empty. Men and women learn the same subjects. It sounds like paradise, until you notice the details: slavery exists, religious conformity is enforced, and citizens report each other's heterodox thoughts to elected officials. Is this the perfect society or a prison dressed in good intentions? More's genius lies in the ambiguity. He wrote Utopia as both genuine reform pamphlet and savage satire of Tudor England, puncturing the pretensions of European power while daring readers to ask whether any imagined perfection can survive human nature. Five centuries later, Utopia remains the essential text for anyone who has ever looked at the world and thought: there must be a better way.
Editions
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“For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them.””
— Thomas, Saint More
“A pretty face may be enough to catch a man, but it takes character and good nature to hold him.””
— Thomas, Saint More
“[how can anyone] be silly enough to think himself better than other people, because his clothes are made of finer woolen thread than theirs. After all, those fine clothes were once worn by a sheep, and they never turned it into anything better than a sheep.””
— Thomas, Saint More
“You wouldn't abandon ship in a storm just because you couldn't control the winds.””
— Thomas, Saint More
“Instead of inflicting these horrible punishments, it would be far more to the point to provide everyone with some means of livelihood, so that nobody's under the frightful necessity of becoming first a thief and then a corpse.””
— Thomas, Saint More
“Nobody owns anything but everyone is rich - for what greater wealth can there be than cheerfulness, peace of mind, and freedom from anxiety?””
— Thomas, Saint More
“Pride thinks it's own happiness shines the brighter by comparing it with the misfortunes of others.””
— Thomas, Saint More
“Kindness and good nature unite men more effectually and with greater strength than any agreements whatsoever, since thereby the engagements of men's hearts become stronger than the bond and obligation of words.””
— Thomas, Saint More
“Why do you suppose they made you king in the first place?' I ask him. 'Not for your benefit, but for theirs. They meant you to devote your energies to making their lives more comfortable, and protecting them from injustice. So your job is to see that they're all right, not that you are - just as a shepherd's job, strictly speaking, is to feed his sheep, not himself.””
— Thomas, Saint More
