Thomas More

While a prisoner in the Tower of London awaiting his certain execution, Thomas More reflected on, among many other things, the perfidy of the English bishops who signed the oath accepting King Henry as the supreme head of the Church in England. Only one, John Fisher, refused, and he paid with his life. --Richard John Neuhaus, While We’re At It, The Public Square column, First Things, April 2004


...although he believed that boys and girls were entitled to equal education, More thought it wrong for women to publish books or to make any show of their learning. So when Margaret, brought up to excel and encouraged by a good tutor, expressed a hope that she might one day publish something, her father warned her off. --Claire Tomalin, A Woman for All Seasons , The New York Times, April 2, 2009, review of A Daughter's Love: Thomas More and His Dearest Meg, by John Guy

Pro-capitalist churchmen have dismissed the moneyless communism of the Utopia as just another of More’s witticisms, and attempted to prove that his slashing criticisms of sixteenth-century society were motivated by a scholastic defense of monasticism. Socialists, on the other hand, have dismissed his attempt to construct a society in which covetousness, pride, sloth and anger were inhibited to the greatest degree compatible with an organic social flexibility. To them such ideas have been just the reflection of the poverty of the pre-capitalist mode of production. --Kenneth Rexroth, Thomas More's 'Utopia', The New York Times (1964), reprinted in With Eye and Ear (1970)

A Catholic father, review of A Daughter’s Love: Thomas and Margaret More, by John Guy, Economist, July 17, 2008

Thomas More for Our Season, by Robert H. Bork, First Things June/July 1999

The Story of Thomas More, by John Farrow

The Life of Sir Thomas More, by William Roper


Center for Thomas More Studies