Utopia (Penguin Classics)

Written in his relative youth, long before the Chancellor business, or the messy question of who was the legitimate queen of England. In Latin, for a select audience of educated men.

More created a fantastical land, governed by a strange new communal system. Perhaps he was hearkening back to the early Christian church, where the believers held all their possessions in common while they waited for Christ to return. Maybe he started with a hard look at Tudor England and pulled everything that disgusted him out of it, just to see what sort of world would be revealed.

He came up with a world unlike anything that anyone had seen before. But there were some things that he could not imagine. He couldn't imagine a land without religion, so devised a vague sort of proto-Unitarianism. He couldn't envision a classless society, and gave the Utopians slaves to do the truly dirty work. He never dreamed that equality between the sexes might be possible. Also, he had a thing about adultery and premarital sex. In his Utopia they were strictly outlawed. It seems like a trivial thing for him to have gotten so worked up about that he lost his head over it. Which, come to think of it, is what he did.

1) [On advising counsellors] ''They'll behave as though their professional reputations were at stake, and they'd look fools for the rest of their lives if they couldn't raise some objection to your proposal. Failing all else, their last resort will be: 'This was good enough for our ancestors, and who are we to question their wisdom?' Then they'll settle back in their chairs, with an air of having said the last word on the subject -- as if it would be a major disaster for anyone to be caught being wiser than their ancestors!''

''Though, to tell you the truth, my dear More, I don't see how you can ever get any real justice or prosperity, so long as there's private property, and everything's judged in terms of money -- unless you consider it just for the worst sort of people to have the very best living conditions, or unless you're prepared to call a country prosperous, in which all the wealth is owned by a tiny minority -- who aren't entirely happy even so, while everyone else is simply miserable.''

''The slaughtering of livestock and cleaning of corpses is done by slaves. They don't let ordinary people get used to cutting up animals, because they think it tends to destroy one's natural feelings of humanity.''

''You see how it is -- wherever you are, you always have to work. There's never any excuse for idleness. There are also no wine-taverns, no ale-houses, no brothels, no opportunities for seduction, no secret meeting-places. Everyone has his eye on you, so you're practically forced to get on with your job, and make some proper use of your spare time.''