Severe and terrible punishments are enacted for theft, when it would be much better to enable every man to earn his own living, instead of being driven to the awful necessity of stealing and then dying for it.
There is a great number of noblemen among you that are themselves as idle as drones, that subsist on other men’s labour, on the labour of their tenants, whom, to raise their revenues, they pare to the quick.
If you do not find a remedy to these evils, it is a vain thing to boast of your severity in punishing theft, which though it may have the appearance of justice, yet in itself is neither just nor convenient. 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 for which their first education disposes them, what else is to be concluded from this but that you first make thieves and then punish them?
When you give somebody your word, it is like taking your life and holding it in your hands. You are cupping your life in your hands when you are giving them your word. And should you let that word fall through, you will look down and not find yourself there.
Every eutopia contains a dystopia, every dystopia contains a eutopia. In.
What’s medicine for some people is poison for others – because you can never pay Paul without robbing Peter.
The most part of all be unlearned, and a great number hath learning in contempt.
If we Americans hate injustice and inequality as passionately as we say we do, would any person in this country lack enough to eat? We demand a rebellious spirit of those who have no chance to learn that rebellion is possible, but we the privileged hold still and see no evil. We.
A sensible person, they say, prefers keeping well to taking medicine, and would rather feel cheerful than have people trying to comfort him.
Why, even poverty itself, the one problem that has always seemed to need money for its solution, would promptly disappear if money ceased to exist.
You can get to the Underworld from anywhere.
Be angry, but sin not.
These ensure that they value life too much to throw it recklessly away, but not enough to cling on to it in a mean and cowardly manner, when it’s their duty to give it up.
Human nature constitutes a treaty in itself, and human beings are far more effectively united by kindness than by contracts, by feelings than by words.
Their idea of quitting themselves like men is to achieve victory by means of something which only man possessed, that is, by the power of the intellect. They say any animal can fight with its body – bears, lions, boars, wolves, dogs can all do it, and most of them are stronger and fiercer than we are – but what raises us above them is our reason and intelligence.
But as to the question, ‘What more convenient way of punishment can be found?’ I think it much easier to find out that than to invent anything that is worse; why.
It is the fear of want that makes any of the whole race of animals either greedy or ravenous but besides fear there is in man a pride that makes him fancy it a particular glory to excel others in pomp and excess but by the laws of the utopians there is no room for this.
For it is too extreme and cruel a punishment for theft, and yet not sufficient to restrain men from theft. For simple theft is not so great an offense that it ought to be punished with death. Neither is there any punishment that is so horrible that it can keep men from stealing who have no other craft whereby to get their living.
The same trade generally passes down from father to son, inclinations often following descent: but if any man’s genius lies another way he is, by adoption, translated into a family that deals in the trade to which he is inclined;.
They, in opposition to the sentiments of almost all other nations, think that there is nothing more inglorious than that glory that is gained by war.