"And it will fall out as in a complication of diseases, that by applying a remedy to one sore, you will provoke another; and that which removes the one ill symptom produces others"
About this Quote
Policy, More warns, is medicine practiced on a living body that keeps developing new ailments. The line carries the cool fatalism of a lawyer who knows every fix has a shadow cost: treat one wound and you inflame another; remove a symptom and the system expresses its distress elsewhere. It works because it refuses the fantasy of clean solutions. More is not preaching passivity so much as puncturing the righteous certainty of reformers who believe a single act of will can tidy up society.
The phrasing "complication of diseases" is doing heavy lifting. It frames the state as an interlinked organism rather than a machine with replaceable parts. A machine can be repaired; an organism reacts. More smuggles in an early version of what we now call second-order effects: policies create incentives, incentives create behavior, behavior creates new crises. The moral subtext is equally sharp. Remedies are not neutral; they carry the values and appetites of the person administering them. A cure can be a kind of violence.
Context matters. More lived through Tudor consolidation, religious upheaval, and the brutal pragmatics of court power. As the author of Utopia, he understood both the seduction of perfect blueprints and their danger when translated into coercive reality. Read against that backdrop, the quote becomes a warning about governance as triage: you choose which pain to accept, which risk to trigger, and which "ill symptom" you can politically survive. It is an argument for humility, not optimism: act, but expect backlash, and count the unintended consequences as part of the bill.
The phrasing "complication of diseases" is doing heavy lifting. It frames the state as an interlinked organism rather than a machine with replaceable parts. A machine can be repaired; an organism reacts. More smuggles in an early version of what we now call second-order effects: policies create incentives, incentives create behavior, behavior creates new crises. The moral subtext is equally sharp. Remedies are not neutral; they carry the values and appetites of the person administering them. A cure can be a kind of violence.
Context matters. More lived through Tudor consolidation, religious upheaval, and the brutal pragmatics of court power. As the author of Utopia, he understood both the seduction of perfect blueprints and their danger when translated into coercive reality. Read against that backdrop, the quote becomes a warning about governance as triage: you choose which pain to accept, which risk to trigger, and which "ill symptom" you can politically survive. It is an argument for humility, not optimism: act, but expect backlash, and count the unintended consequences as part of the bill.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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