Gulliver’s Travels

Famous quotes

• It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death, rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end.

  Part I: A Voyage to Lilliput, Chapter IVIn context

  • Comedy
  • War & Peace

• Of so little weight are the greatest services to princes, when put into the balance with a refusal to gratify their passions.

  Part I: A Voyage to Lilliput, Chapter VIn context

  • Power

• They look upon fraud as a greater crime than theft, and therefore seldom fail to punish it with death; for they allege, that care and vigilance, with a very common understanding, may preserve a man’s goods from thieves, but honesty has no defence against superior cunning

  Part I: A Voyage to Lilliput, Chapter VIIn context

  • Laws
  • Truth & Lies

• You have clearly proved, that ignorance, idleness, and vice, are the proper ingredients for qualifying a legislator; that laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied, by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them.

  Part II: A Voyage to Brobdingnag, Chapter VIIn context

  • Clever Jabs
  • Laws
  • Politics

• I cannot but conclude 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.

  Part II: A Voyage to Brobdingnag, Chapter VIIn context

  • Clever Jabs

• 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.

  Part II: A Voyage to Brobdingnag, Chapter VIIIn context

  • Politics
  • Work

• He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers.

  Voyage to Laputa, Ch. 5In context

  • Science

• I said the thing which was not;” for they have no word in their language to express lying or falsehood.

  Part IV: A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms, Chapter IIIIn context

  • Truth & Lies

• Poor nations are hungry, and rich nations are proud; and pride and hunger will ever be at variance.

  Part IV: A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms, Chapter VIn context

  • Pride
  • War & Peace

• A soldier is a Yahoo hired to kill, in cold blood, as many of his own species, who have never offended him, as possibly he can.

  Part IV: A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms, Chapter VIn context

  • War & Peace

• There was a society of men among us, bred up from their youth in the art of proving, by words multiplied for the purpose, that white is black, and black is white, according as they are paid.

  Part IV: A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms, Chapter VIn context

  • Clever Jabs
  • Laws
  • Truth & Lies

• It is a maxim among these lawyers that whatever has been done before, may legally be done again: and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice, and the general reason of mankind. These, under the name of precedents, they produce as authorities to justify the most iniquitous opinions; and the judges never fail of directing accordingly.

  Part IV: A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms, Chapter VIn context

  • Justice
  • Laws

• A traveller’s chief aim should be to make men wiser and better, and to improve their minds by the bad, as well as good, example of what they deliver concerning foreign places.

  Part IV: A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms, Chapter XIIIn context

  • Wisdom
  • Writing

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