Faith & Spirit Quote by Robert Bolt

A clean moral maxim gets punctured by a single, petty place name, and the joke lands like a knife. Robert Bolt’s line from A Man for All Seasons borrows the muscle of Scripture ("What shall it profit a man...") and then sabotages its own grandeur with "but for Wales!" The whiplash is the point: the sentence begins in the register of eternal salvation and ends in the register of provincial grievance. It’s comedy as character X-ray.

In context, it’s aimed at Richard Rich, the ambitious clerk willing to bend principle for advancement. The offer on the table isn’t "the whole world" but a bureaucratic prize: a post in Wales. Bolt’s intent is surgical - to make corruption look not operatic but cheap. The line ridicules the way people dress up self-interest in serious language, then reveals the actual price tag is laughably small. Wales functions less as a nation than as a symbol of anti-climax: not even a glamorous sin, just a dreary promotion.

The subtext stings because it exposes a truth about moral compromise: it rarely begins with grand villainy. It starts with rationalizations, with the sense that one tiny concession will buy security, status, a future. Bolt, writing in the mid-20th century with a wary eye on ideological conformity and careerist cowardice, turns martyrdom into a mirror for modern institutions. Thomas More’s integrity isn’t presented as saintly abstraction; it’s made legible by contrast with a man who trades his soul for something as banal as a line on a resume.