Thomas More Quotes

(1) Thomas More, letter to William Gonell, who was employed as a tutor of his children (22nd May, 1518)

I have warned my children to avoid the precipices of pride and haughtiness, and to walk in the pleasant meadows of modesty; not to be dazzled at the sight of gold; not to lament that they do not possess what they erroneously admire in others; not to think more of themselves for gaudy trappings, nor less for the want of them, neither to deform the beauty that nature has given them by neglect, nor to try to heighten it by artifice, to put virtue in the first place, learning in the second; and in their studies to esteem most whatever may teach them piety towards God, charity to all, and Christian humility in themselves....

By such means they will receive from God the reward of an innocent life, and the assured expectation of it, will view death without horror, and meanwhile possessing solid joy, will neither be puffed up by the empty praise of men, nor dejected by evil tongues. These I consider the genuine fruits of learning...

Nor do I think the harvest will be much affected whether it is a man or a woman who sows the field. They both have the same human nature, which reason differentiates from that of beasts; both, therefore, are equally suited for these studies by which reason is cultivated, and becomes fruitful like a ploughed land on which seed of good lessons has been sown.

If it be true that the soil of woman's brain be bad, and apter (appropriate) to bear bracken than corn, by which saying many keep women from study. I think, on the contrary, that a woman's wit is on that account all the more diligently to be cultivated, that nature's defect may be reduced by industry. This was the opinion of the ancients, of those who were most prudent as the most holy. Not to speak of the rest, St Jerome and St Augustine not only exhorted excellent matrons and most noble virgins to study, but in order to assist them, diligently explained the abstruse meanings of Holy Scripture, and wrote for tender girls letters replete with no much erudition, that now-a-days old men, who call themselves professors of sacred science, can scarcely read them correctly, much less understand them.

(2) Thomas More, Utopia (1516) Book I

The island of Utopia is in the middle two hundred miles broad, and holds almost at the same breadth over a great part of it, but it grows narrower towards both ends. Its figure is not unlike a crescent. Between its horns the sea comes in eleven miles broad, and spreads itself into a great bay, which is environed with land to the compass of about five hundred miles, and is well secured from winds. In this bay there is no great current; the whole coast is, as it were, one continued harbour, which gives all that live in the island great convenience for mutual commerce. But the entry into the bay, occasioned by rocks on the one hand and shallows on the other, is very dangerous. In the middle of it there is one single rock which appears above water, and may, therefore, easily be avoided; and on the top of it there is a tower, in which a garrison is kept; the other rocks lie under water, and are very dangerous. The channel is known only to the natives; so that if any stranger should enter into the bay without one of their pilots he would run great danger of shipwreck.

(3) Thomas More, Utopia (1516) Book I

I think putting thieves to death is not lawful; and it is plain and obvious that it is absurd and of ill consequence to the commonwealth that a thief and a murderer should be equally punished; for if a robber sees that his danger is the same if he is convicted of theft as if he were guilty of murder, this will naturally incite him to kill the person whom otherwise he would only have robbed; since, if the punishment is the same, there is more security, and less danger of discovery, when he that can best make it is put out of the way; so that terrifying thieves too much provokes them to cruelty.

(4) Thomas More, Utopia (1516) Book I

When Raphael Hythloday had thus made an end of speaking, though many things occurred to me, both concerning the manners and laws of the people, that seemed very absurd, as well as their way of making war, as in their notions of religion and divine matters, together with several other particulars, but chiefly what seemed the foundations of all the rest, their living in common, without the use of money, by which all nobility, magnificence, splendor, and majesty, which, according to the common opinion, are the true ornaments of a nation, would be quite taken away.

(5) Thomas More, Utopia (1516) Book II

I have described for you as accurately as I can the structure of the commonwealth of Utopia, which I believe to be the only the best social order in the world, but the only one that can properly claim to be literally a commonwealth. Everywhere else people talk about the public good but pay attention to their own private interests. In Utopia, where there is no private property, everyone is seriously concerned with pursuing the public welfare. Both here and there people act with good reason, for the outside Utopia there can't be anyone who doesn't realize that unless they take care of their own welfare they may die of hunger, no matter how much the commonwealth prospers.

(6) Thomas More, Utopia (1516) Book VII

They have but few laws, and such is their constitution that they need not many. They very much condemn other nations whose laws, together with the commentaries on them, swell up to so many volumes; for they think it an unreasonable thing to oblige men to obey a body of laws that are both of such a bulk, and so dark as not to be read and understood by every one of the subjects.

(7) Thomas More, Utopia (1516) Book IX

There are several sorts of religions, not only in different parts of the island, but even in every town; some worshipping the sun, others the moon or one of the planets. Some worship such men as have been eminent in former times for virtue or glory, not only as ordinary deities, but as the supreme god. Yet the greater and wiser sort of them worship none of these, but adore one eternal, invisible, infinite, and incomprehensible Deity; as a Being that is far above all our apprehensions, that is spread over the whole universe, not by His bulk, but by His power and virtue; Him they call the Father of All, and acknowledge that the beginnings, the increase, the progress, the vicissitudes, and the end of all things come only from Him; nor do they offer divine honours to any but to Him alone. And, indeed, though they differ concerning other things, yet all agree in this: that they think there is one Supreme Being that made and governs the world, whom they call, in the language of their country, Mithras . They differ in this: that one thinks the god whom he worships is this Supreme Being, and another thinks that his idol is that god; but they all agree in one principle, that whoever is this Supreme Being, He is also that great essence to whose glory and majesty all honours are ascribed by the consent of all nations....

This law was made by Utopia, not only for preserving the public peace, which he saw suffered much by daily contentions and irreconcilable heats, but because he thought the interest of religion itself required it. He judged it not fit to determine anything rashly; and seemed to doubt whether those different forms of religion might not all come from God, who might inspire man in a different manner, and be pleased with this variety; he therefore thought it indecent and foolish for any man to threaten and terrify another to make him believe what did not appear to him to be true. And supposing that only one religion was really true, and the rest false, he imagined that the native force of truth would at last break forth and shine bright, if supported only by the strength of argument, and attended to with a gentle and unprejudiced mind; while, on the other hand, if such debates were carried on with violence and tumults, as the most wicked are always the most obstinate, so the best and most holy religion might be choked with superstition, as corn is with briars and thorns; he therefore left men wholly to their liberty, that they might be free to believe as they should see cause.

(8) Thomas More, Utopia (1516) Book IX

Therefore I must say that, as I hope for mercy, 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, and devise all the ways and arts they can find out; first, that they may, without danger, preserve all that they have so ill-acquired, and then, that they may engage the poor to toil and labour for them at as low rates as possible, and oppress them as much as they please; and if they can but prevail to get these contrivances established by the show of public authority, which is considered as the representative of the whole people, then they are accounted laws.

(9) Thomas More, comments to his executioner (6th July, 1535)

You will give me this day a greater benefit than ever any mortal man can be able to give me. Pluck up thy spirits, man, and be not afraid to do thine office. My neck is very short; take heed, therefore, thou strike not awry for saving of thine honesty.

(10) Thomas More, last words (6th July, 1535)

I die the king's faithful servant, and God's first.

Quotations on Thomas More

(11) Alison Plowden, Tudor Women (2002)

More was the first Englishman seriously to experiment with the novel idea that girls should be educated too. This may have been partly due to the fact that he had three daughters and an adopted daughter but only one son, and was undoubtedly helped by the fact that the eldest girl, Margaret, turned out to be unusually intelligent and receptive.

(12) Alison Weir, The Six Wives of Henry VIII (2007)

Sir Thomas More, whose daughters were renowned examples of womanly erudition, as well as the shining examples of both Catherine of Aragon and Catherine Parr who proved that women could be both learned and virtuous, the Renaissance concept of female education became accepted and even applauded... in Henry VIII's time, the education of girls was the privilege of the royal and the rich, and its chief aim was to produce future wives schooled in godly and moral precepts. It was not intended to promote independent thinking; indeed, it tended to the opposite.

(13) Anthony Grayling, The History of Philosophy (2019)

For the citizens of More's Utopia the end is the pursuit of virtue for its own sake. When everyone takes delight in individual and collective virtue the state is at peace externally and internally, it is free, it is not wracked by the "conspiracy of the rich pursuing their own private interests under the name and title of the commonwealth". Public service is the noblest of callings; and More recognizes the force of a Platonic view (expressed by the character Raphael Hythloday) that the abolition of private property and a "complete equality of goods" would make possible the Utopia he described.... More himself ends on a note of doubt about such a complete system of communism, which he perceives is the 'foundation' of the Utopia Hythloday describes, that is, "their living in common, without the use of money, by which all nobility, magnificence, splendor, and majesty, which, according to the common opinion, are the true ornaments of a nation, would be quite taken away." He does not end by endorsing this latter view outright; he says he would himself like to see in his own country many of the things Hythloday describes; but he leaves open which things he would not like to see.

(14) Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (1946)

In Utopia, as in Plato's Republic, all things are held in common, the public good cannot flourish where there is private property, and without communism there can be no equality. More, in the dialogue, objects that communism would make men idle, and destroy respect for magistrates; to this Raphael replies that no one would say this who had lived in Utopia.

There are in Utopia fifty-four towns, all on the same plan, except that one is the capital. All the streets are twenty feet broad, and all the private houses are exactly alike, with one door onto the street and one onto the garden. There are no locks on the doors, and everyone may enter any house. The roofs are flat. Every tenth year people change houses - apparently to prevent any feeling of ownership...

In the country, there are farms, each containing not fewer than forty persons... Each farm is under the rule of a master and mistress, who are old and wise. The chickens are not hatched by hens, but in incubators (which did not exist in More's time). All are dressed alike, except that there is a difference between the dress of men and women, and of married and unmarried. The fashions never change... Each family makes its own clothes... In the case of a painful incurable disease, the patient is advised to commit suicide, but is carefully tended if he refuses to do so.

Everybody - men and women alike - works six hours a day, three before dinner and three after. All go to bed at eight, and sleep eight hours. In the early morning there are lectures, to which multitudes go, although they are not compulsory. After supper an hour is devoted to play. Six hours' work is enough, because there are no idlers and there is no useless work; with us, it is said, women, priests, rich people, servants, and beggars, mostly do nothing useful, and owing to the existence of the rich much labour is spent in producing unnecessary luxuries; all this is avoided in Utopia. Sometimes it is found that there is a surplus, and the magistrates proclaim a shorter working day for a time... The government is a representative democracy, with a system of indirect election...

As for marriage, both men and women are sharply punished if not virgin when they marry; and the householder of any house in which misconduct has occurred is liable to incur infamy for carelessness. Before marriage, bride and groom see each other naked; no one would buy a horse without first taking off the saddle and bridle, and similar considerations should apply in marriage. There is divorce for adultery or "intolerable waywardness" of either party, but the guilty party cannot remarry. Sometimes divorce is granted solely because both parties desire it.

There is foreign trade, chiefly for the purpose of getting iron, of which there is none in the island. The Utopians think nothing of martial glory, though all learn how to fight, women as well as men. They resort to war for three purposes; to defend their own territory when invaded; to deliver the territory of an ally from invaders; and to free an oppressed nation from tyranny. But whenever they can, they get mercenaries to fight their wars for them...

There are many religions among them, all of which are tolerated. Almost all believe in God and immortality; the few who do not are not accounted citizens, and have no part in political life, but are otherwise unmolested.... Women can be priests, if they are old and widowed. The priests are few; they have honour, but no power...

Raphael Hythloday relates that he preached Christianity to the Utopians, and that many were converted when they learnt that Christ was opposed to private property. The importance of communism is constantly stressed; almost at the end we are told that in all other nations "I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the commonwealth."

(15) Jasper Ridley, The Statesman and the Fanatic (1982)

As Thomas More approached the age of fifty, all the conflicting trends in his strange character blended into one, and produced the savage persecutor of heretics who devoted his life to the destruction of Lutheranism. To say that he suffered from paranoia on this subject would be to resort to a glib phrase, not a serious psychiatric analysis; but it is unquestionable that More, like other persecutors throughout history, believed that the foundations of civilisation, and all that he valued as sacred, were threatened by the forces of evil, and that it was his mission to exterminate the enemy by all means, including torture and lies. The worst of all the heretics were the Anabaptists, the most extreme of all the Protestant sects, who were already causing great concern to the authorities in Germany and the Netherlands. They not only rejected infant baptism, but believed, like the inhabitants of Utopia, that goods should be held in common. In 1528 More wrote to the German theologian, Cochlaeus: "The past centuries have not seen anything more monstrous than the Anabaptists"...

He was bitterly hated by the Protestants. His contemporary, Tyndale, and John Foxe thirty years after his death, picked him out, with one or two others, as the most cruel of all the persecutors. Neither More himself, nor his Catholic supporters in the sixteenth century, wished to rebut this accusation which in their eyes was creditable to him, though More denied a few specific allegations made by the Protestants. In the twentieth century, his admirers have tried to defend him from the charge of being a notorious persecutor. They have adopted two main lines of argument. The first is to deny the truth of the worst accusations, especially the story that he whipped heretics in his garden; and here they are probably right in many cases. The second is to claim that More, as a layman, cannot be held responsible for the persecution of heretics, because heretics were condemned in the court of the bishop of their diocese. This argument is exactly the reverse of that which has sometimes been used by apologists for the Catholic Church, including More himself in his Dialogue concerning Heresies - that it was the temporal power, not the Church, which burned heretics; and it is unsound.

(16) Melvyn Bragg, The Daily Telegraph (6th June, 2013)

The fury of the then Establishment is difficult to credit. The Bishop of London bought up an entire edition of 6,000 copies and burned them on the steps of the old St Paul’s Cathedral. More went after Tyndale’s old friends and tortured them. Richard Bayfield, a monk accused of reading Tyndale, was one who died a graphically horrible death as described in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. More stamped on his ashes and cursed him. And among others there was John Firth, a friend of Tyndale, who was burned so slowly that he was more roasted.

(17) Jasper Ridley, Bloody Mary's Martyrs (2002)

No one was more active in persecuting the Protestants who distributed the English Bible than Sir Thomas More, a brilliant lawyer, writer and intellectual who was a particularly nasty sadomasochistic pervert. He enjoyed being flogged by his favourite daughter as much as flogging heretics, beggars and lunatics in his garden. He humiliated his wife by pointing out to his guests, in her presence, how ugly she was in order to show that he had not married her because he was lusting for a beautiful woman. When he was writing as a propagandist for the Catholic Church, he was a shameless liar. On one occasion he wrote a very favourable review of his own book, pretending that it had been written by a non-existent, eminent, foreign theologian, when in fact he had written it himself.

(18) Andrew Hope, Richard Bayfield : Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004-2014)

Bayfield now took on the role of the main supplier of prohibited reformation books to the English market, a role vacant since the arrest of Thomas Garrett in 1528.... Bayfield showed signs of not always appreciating the extreme danger he was in. He had indiscreet conversations with people who did not share his views. He was arrested at a London bookbinder's, possibly in October 1531, imprisoned, and interrogated by More.... He was convicted as a relapsed heretic, degraded, and burnt with excruciating slowness at Smithfield.

(19) Seymour Baker House, Thomas More : Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004-2014)

The vigour with which More pursued heretics through the courts was mirrored by the relentlessness with which he fought them... The times demanded strictness, he repeatedly argued, because the stakes were so high. No other aspect of More's life has engendered greater controversy than his persecution of heretics. Critics argue that as one of Europe's leading intellectuals, and one with particularly strong humanist leanings, More should have rejected capital punishment of heretics. His supporters point out that he was a product of his times, and that those men he most admired... lamented but accepted as necessary the practice of executing heretics.

(20) Colin Burrow, London Review of Books (30th April, 2009)

Thomas More is here a dogmatic persecutor of heretics (which he was), a man perhaps unhealthily obsessed by his daughter Meg (which he may have been), and someone who makes cruelly unfunny jokes about his second wife, Dame Alice (which he did). He is not much else (although he was). Here Mantel’s revisionary eye seems cruel, or to have missed something. Her Wolsey has an instinctive ability to see into events and into people, and has wit and warmth. Her More is a stubborn old Catholic sexist.

(21) Lacey Baldwin Smith, Treason in Tudor England (2006)

Once the Reformation broke out, conspiracy took on more sinister and far more cosmic proportions, but nevertheless the conviction prevailed that heresy and its uglier stepsister sedition were the product of tiny groups of conspiring individuals determined upon private profit. Despite the extraordinary speed with which Protestant ideas spread and their obvious association with the basic economic, political and psychological needs of the century, More... continued to view the religious upheaval as the work of a handful of evil men and women set upon corrupting innocent but, alas, gullible subjects.

(22) Helen Langdon, Holbein (1976)

Holbein presents the public figure, robed in authority (for all his saintly reputation More was ferocious enough to condemn heretics to be burnt.) The determined severity of countenance betrays little of the retiring scholar, although this is suggested in the figure's slight sloop. More was certainly concerned with the impression he made, insisting on having the flamboyant cuffs on his official costume replaced by ascetic plain ones.

(23) Peter Ackroyd, Tudors (2012)

Since More was known to be an avid hunter of heretics, it was evident proof that Henry did not wish to disavow the orthodox Church. In fact, More started his pursuit within a month of taking his position he arrested a citizen of London, Thomas Phillips, on suspicion of heresy... It was the beginning of the new chancellor's campaign of terror against the heretics.

(24) Melanie McDonagh, The Evening Standard (17th September 2009)

Hilary Mantel's Tudor novel, Wolf Hall is a kind of one-volume compensation for all the times the Man Booker prizewinner has been bought and not read.

And that's the trouble. Because it's so readable, so convincing, it risks being taken as a true version of events. And that's scary. Because one of the things it does is to reverse the standing of two Thomases: Cromwell and More. The novel does a grave disservice to More who was, whatever else you say about him, one of the great men of the Renaissance.

In Wolf Hall, you don't get the author of Utopia, Erasmus's favourite companion (these things are mentioned but with a sneer). You don't get the humanist and the humorist. What you get is a heretic-hunter, whose wit is turned to dry sarcasm and whose world view is simple religious fanaticism. This is Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons turned on its head. Granted, Bolt's play wasn't historical verity either but it was, in depicting Thomas More as the martyr of conscience, truthful.

All right, historical fiction is just that: fiction. But nowadays, we know so little history, the Wolf Hall version may well pass for reality, especially when it's true to some extent (the sympathetic portrait of Cardinal Wolsey is perfectly credible). Certainly its prejudices are congenial to the liberal-individualistic mindset that dominates our intellectual life. We may read the novel, or at least the reviews; and that's what's going to stick.

For the simple-minded dinner-party liberal, the Thomas Cromwell that Hilary Mantel depicts is infinitely attractive: secular-minded, tolerant, contemptuous of superstition, sneery about religious credulity, a meritocrat of humble origins, fond of children and animals, multilingual, handy in a fight. Indeed, if the prevailing mindset in Britain right now is a kind of secular Protestantism then Thomas Cromwell as drawn by Hilary Mantel is its man.

Trouble is, there is a reason why Cromwell has had a longstanding reputation as a complete bastard. The tally of the executions over which he presided - including those for heresy - far surpassed More's. And unlike More, he was unlikely to have been swayed by the notion that what he was doing was for the good of souls.

(25) Bishop Mark O’Toole of Plymouth, The Catholic Herald (2nd February, 2015)

Those modern parallels need to be cautiously drawn. Hilary Mantel does have this view that being a Catholic is destructive to your humanity. It is not historically accurate and it is not accurate in what the Catholic faith has to contribute to society and to the common good as a whole. There is an anti-Catholic thread there, there is no doubt about it. Wolf Hall is not neutral...

The picture of More is dark. More was a man of his time and heresy was the big sin, really, it was the big wrong on both sides. It is hard for us in our modern mentality to see it as wrong. They looked on heretics as we look upon drug traffickers. But it is inaccurate to say that he (St Thomas) condemned people to death.

(26) Bishop Mark Davies of Shrewsbury, The Catholic Herald (2nd February, 2015)

We should remember Wolf Hall is a work of fiction. It is an extraordinary and perverse achievement of Hilary Mantel and BBC Drama to make of Thomas Cromwell a flawed hero and of St Thomas More, one of the greatest Englishmen, a scheming villain.

It is not necessary to share Thomas More’s faith to recognise his heroism – a man of his own time who remains an example of integrity for all times. It would be sad if Thomas Cromwell, who is surely one of the most unscrupulous figures in England’s history, was to be held-up as a role model for future generations.

(27) Jonathan Jones, The Guardian (29th January, 2015)

The most compelling proof of Thomas More’s wit, warmth and original way of seeing things is his masterpiece, Utopia. Anyone who dreams of a better world should revere More, because in this 1516 book he created the very idea of utopianism – and named it. Yet his imaginary island somewhere in the Americas is not all it seems. Utopia is simultaneously a serious discussion of the ideal society (which, according to More, would be communist) and a text that mocks itself. More introduces jokes that undercut the book’s apparent message. The result is a complex intellectual balancing of ideas: we need ideals. We need to dream of a better society. We also need to beware of those dreams....

Why does Wolf Hall demonise one of the most brilliant and forward-looking of all Renaissance people? Its caricature of Thomas More as a charmless prig, a humourless alienating nasty piece of work, is incredibly unfair... Why did Hilary Mantel choose to portray him in a way that flies in the face of all the evidence?