Thomas More Quotes

For as love is oftentimes won with beauty, so it is not kept, preserved, and continued, but by virtue and obedience.

For things will never be perfect, until human beings are perfect - which I don't expect them to be for quite a number of years!

You wouldn't abandon ship in a storm just because you couldn't control the winds.

As God loves me, when I consider this, then every modern society seems to me to be nothing but a conspiracy of the rick, who while protesting their interest in the common good pursue their own interests and stop at no trick and deception to secure their ill-gotten possessions, to pay as little as possible for the labor that produces their wealth and so force its makers to accept the nearest thing to nothing. They contrive rules for securing and assuring these tidy profits for the rich in the name of the common good, including of course the poor, and call them laws!

I'd rather say something untrue than tell a lie. In short, I'd rather be honest than clever.

And though no man have anything [in Utopia], yet every man is rich. For what can be more rich than to live joyfully and merrily without all grief and pensiveness, not caring for his own living . . . ?

Fortune doth both raise up the low and pluck down the high.

Most people know nothing about learning; many despise it. Dummies reject as too hard whatever is not dumb.

Translation: This vice [Pride] does not measure happiness so much by its own conveniences, as by the miseries of others.

This hath not offended the king.

We asked him many questions concerning all these things, to which he answered very willingly; we made no inquiries after monsters, than which nothing is more common; for everywhere one may hear of ravenous dogs and wolves, and cruel men-eaters, but it is not so easy to find states that are well and wisely governed.

To gold and silver nature hath given no use that we may not well lack.

The Utopians call those nations that come and ask magistrates from them Neighbours; but those to whom they have been of more particular service, Friends; and as all other nations are perpetually either making leagues or breaking them, they never enter into an alliance with any state. They think leagues are useless things, and believe that if the common ties of humanity do not knit men together, the faith of promises will have no great effect; and they are the more confirmed in this by what they see among the nations round about them, who are no strict observers of leagues and treaties.

to pursue your own interests is prudent; to pursue the public interest as well is pious; but to pursue your own pleasure by depriving others of theirs is unjust.

If honor were profitable, everybody would be honorable.