True story of Gulliver’s Travels
When Jonathan Swift published Gulliver’s Travels in 1726 he intended it as a satire on the ferociousness of human nature. Instead, today it is enjoyed as a children’s story.
In another book, called ‘A Modest Proposal’, Swift suggested that the solution to poverty and overpopulation is to raise and eat the children, as one would with sheep or cattle.
Swift wrote a lot of stories but burned most of it. He died in 1745, aged 78. The last piece he wrote, his will, provided funds for setting up a hospital in Dublin, Ireland (where he lived) for, as he puts it, “idiots and lunatics.”
Jonathan Swift quotes:
May you live all the days of your life.
Once kick the world, and the world and you will live together at a reasonably good understanding.
We are so fond of one another, because our ailments are the same.
The most positive men are the most credulous.
Ambition often puts Men upon doing the meanest offices; so climbing is performed in the same position with creeping.
A tavern is a place where madness is sold by the bottle.