Utopia

Thomas More's account, written in Latin, of a traveller, Raphael Hythloday, who criticises the England of his day and describes the laws and customs of Utopia, an island commonwealth without private property.

Start reading5 books, about 42,000 words

Famous quotes

• Your sheep, which are naturally mild, and easily kept in order, may be said now to devour men and unpeople, not only villages, but towns

  Book IIn context

  • Animals
  • Economics

• 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?

  Book IIn context

  • Education
  • Justice

• If ill opinions cannot be quite rooted out, and you cannot cure some received vice according to your wishes, you must not, therefore, abandon the commonwealth, for the same reasons as you should not forsake the ship in a storm because you cannot command the winds.

  Book IIn context

  • Government
  • Politics
  • Responsibility

• As long as there is any property, and while money is the standard of all other things, I cannot think that a nation can be governed either justly or happily

  Book IIn context

  • Government
  • Money

• They have no lawyers among them, for they consider them as a sort of people whose profession it is to disguise matters and to wrest the laws, and, therefore, they think it is much better that every man should plead his own cause

  Book II (3 of 4)In context

  • Clever Jabs
  • Laws

• In no victory do they glory so much as in that which is gained by dexterity and good conduct without bloodshed.

  Book II (3 of 4)In context

  • War & Peace

• I can have no other notion of all the other governments that I see or know, than that they are a conspiracy of the rich, who, on pretence of managing the public, only pursue their private ends

  Book II (4 of 4)In context

  • Government
  • Money

Contents

1. Book IDiscourses of Raphael Hythloday, of the Best State of a Commonwealth
2. Book II (1 of 4)
3. Book II (2 of 4)
4. Book II (3 of 4)
5. Book II (4 of 4)