Reldresal: It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death, rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end. Many hundred large volumes have been published upon this controversy: but the books of the Big-endians have…
Book 1726
Gulliver's Travels quotes
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About the book
Ship's surgeon Lemuel Gulliver tells of four voyages to unknown lands: an island of tiny people, a land of giants, a flying island run by scientists lost in theory, and a country ruled by wise, rational horses. Swift uses each strange society to hold up a mirror to European politics, science and human nature, and the book remains one of the sharpest satires ever written.
6 quotes
King of Brobdingnag: But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever…
He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers. He told me, he did not doubt, that, in eight years more, he should be…
Luggnaggian Gentleman: When they came to fourscore years, which is reckoned the extremity of living in this country, they had not only all the follies and infirmities of other old men, but many more which arose from the dreadful prospect of never dying. They…
…whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.
But when a creature pretending to reason could be capable of such enormities, he dreaded lest the corruption of that faculty might be worse than brutality itself. He seemed therefore confident, that, instead of reason we were only possessed of some quality…