Top 72 Quotes & Sayings by William Cobbett
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English politician William Cobbett.
Last updated on September 17, 2024.
Endless are the instances of men of bright parts and high spirit having been, by degrees, rendered powerless and despicable by their imaginary wants.
The very hirelings of the press, whose trade it is to buoy up the spirits of the people, have uttered falsehoods so long, they have played off so many tricks, that their budget seems, at last, to be quite empty.
The tendency of taxation is to create a class of persons who do not labor, to take from those who do labor the produce of that labor, and to give it to those who do not labor.
To have a dutiful family, the father's principle of rule must be love, not fear. His sway must be gentle, or he will have only an unwilling and short-lived obedience.
I defy you to agitate any fellow with a full stomach.
Happiness, or misery, is in the mind. It is the mind that lives.
To live well, to enjoy all things that make life pleasant, is the right of every man who constantly uses his strength judiciously and lawfully.
It is by attempting to reach the top in a single leap that so much misery is produced in the world.
The taste of the times is, unhappily, to give to children something of book-learning, with a view of placing them to live, in some way or other, upon the labour of other people.
The great security of all is to eat little and to drink nothing that intoxicates. He that eats till he is full is little better than a beast, and he that drinks till he is drunk is quite a beast.
It is not the greatness of a man's means that makes him independent, so much as the smallness of his wants.
There never yet was, and never will be, a nation permanently great, consisting, for the greater part, of wretched and miserable families.
Women are a sisterhood. They make common cause in behalf of the sex; and, indeed, this is natural enough, when we consider the vast power that the law gives us over them.
Please your eye and plague your heart.
Men of integrity are generally pretty obstinate, in adhering to an opinion once adopted.
To be without sure and safe friends in the world makes life not worth having; and whom can we be so sure of as of our children?
From a very early age I had imbibed the opinion that it was every man's duty to do all that lay in his power to leave his country as good as he had found it.
Never - no, not for one moment - believe that any human being, with sense in his skull, will love or respect you on account of your fine or costly clothes.
Sit down to write what you have thought, and not to think about what you shall write.
You never know what you can do till you try.
Never esteem men on account of their riches or their station. Respect goodness, find it where you may.
Men fail much oftener from want of perseverance than from want of talent.
Another great evil arising from this desire to be thought rich; or rather, from the desire not to be thought poor, is the destructive thing which has been honored by the name of 'speculation'; but which ought to be called Gambling.
To be poor and independent is very nearly an impossibility.
The power which money gives is that of brute force; it is the power of the bludgeon and the bayonet.
If the people of Sheffield could only receive a tenth part of what their knives sell for by retail in America, Sheffield might pave its streets with silver.
A couple of flitches of bacon are worth fifty thousand Methodist sermons and religious tracts. They are great softeners of temper and promoters of domestic harmony.
He who writes badly thinks badly
The ancient nobility and gentry of the kingdom... have been thrust out of all public employment... a race of merchants, and manufacturers and bankers and loan-jobbers and contractors have usurped their place.
I was a countryman and a father before I was a writer on political subjects... Born and bred up in the sweet air myself, I was resolved that my children should be bred up in it too.
A full belly to the labourer was, in my opinion, the foundation of public morals and the only source of real public peace.
However roguish a man may be, he always loves to deal with an honest man.
The smallness of our desires may contribute reasonably to our wealth.
Learning consists of ideas, and not of the noise that is made by the mouth.
Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Canada are the horns, the head, the neck, the shins, and the hoof of the ox, and the United States are the ribs, the sirloin, the kidneys, and the rest of the body.
I view tea drinking as a destroyer of health, an enfeebler of the frame, an en-genderer of effeminancy and laziness, a debaucher of youth and maker of misery for old age. Thus he makes that miserable progress towards that death which he finds ten or fifteen years sooner than he would have found it if he had made his wife brew beer instead of making tea.
Poverty is, except where there is an actual want of food and raiment, a thing much more imaginary than real. The shame of poverty--the shame of being thought poor--it is a great and fatal weakness, though arising in this country, from the fashion of the times themselves.
Nothing is so well calculated to produce a death-like torpor in the country as an extended system of taxation and a great national debt.
It is no small mischief to a boy, that many of the best years of his life should be devoted to the learning of what can never be of any real use to any human being. His mind is necessarily rendered frivolous and superficial by the long habit of attaching importance to words instead of things; to sound instead of sense.
Patience is the most necessary quality for business, many a man would rather you heard his story than grant his request.
It is by attempting to reach the top in a single leap that so much misery is produced in the world.
The tendency of taxation is, to create a class of persons, who do not labour: to take from those who do labour the produce of that labour, and to give it to those who do not labour.
But what is to be the fate of the great wen of all? The monster, called, by the silly coxcombs of the press, "the metropolis of the empire"?
Be you in what line of life you may, it will be amongst your misfortunes if you have not time properly to attend to [money management]; for. ... want of attention to pecuniary matters ... has impeded the progress of science and of genius itself.
The truth is that the fall of Napoleon is the hardest blow that our taxing system ever felt. It is now impossible to make people believe that immense fleets and armies are necessary.
The Christian religion, then, is not an affair of preaching, or prating, or ranting, but of taking care of the bodies as well as the souls of people; not an affair of belief and of faith and of professions, but an affair of doing good, and especially to those who are in want; not an affair of fire and brimstone, but an affair of bacon and bread, beer and a bed.
Grammar, perfectly understood, enables us not only to express our meaning fully and clearly, but so to express it as to enable us to defy the ingenuity of man to give to our words any other meaning than that which we ourselves intend them to express.
Dancing is at once rational & healthful: it gives animal spirits; it is the natural amusement of young people, & such it has been from the days of Moses.
When, from the top of any high hill, one looks round the country, and sees the multitude of regularly distributed spires, one not only ceases to wonder that order and religion are maintained, but one is astonished that any such thing as disaffection or irreligion should prevail.
Before I dismiss this affair of eating and drinking, let me beseech you to resolve to free yourselves from the slavery of the tea and coffee and other slop-kettle, if, unhappily, you have been bred up in such slavery.
All my plans in private life; all my pursuits; all my designs, wishes, and thoughts, have this one great object in view: the overthrow of the ruffian Boroughmongers. If I write grammars; if I write on agriculture; if I sow, plant, or deal in seeds; whatever I do has first in view the destruction of those infamous tyrants.
To suppose such a thing possible as a society, in which men, who are able and willing to work, cannot support their families, and ought, with a great part of the women, to be compelled to lead a life of celibacy, for fear of having children to be starved; to suppose such a thing possible is monstrous.
Another great evil arising from this desire to be thought rich; or rather, from the desire not to be thought poor, is the destructive thing which has been honored by the name of "speculation"; but which ought to be called Gambling.
It is by attempting to reach the top at a single leap that so much misery is caused in the world.
I set out as a sort of self-dependent politician. My opinions were my own. I dashed at all prejudices. I scorned to follow anybodyin matter of opinion.... All were, therefore, offended at my presumption, as they deemed it.
The very hirelings of the press, whose trade it is to buoy up the spirits of the people... have uttered falsehoods so long, they have played off so many tricks, that their budget seems, at last, to be quite empty.
Sit down to write what you have thought, and not to think what you shall write.
Praise the child, and you make love to the mother.
Freedom is not an empty sound; it is not an abstract idea; it is not a thing that nobody can feel. It means, - and it means nothing else, - the full and quiet enjoyment of your own property. If you have not this, if this be not well secured to you, you may call yourself what you will, but you are a slave.
You may twist the word freedom as long as you please, but at last it comes to quiet enjoyment of your own property, or it comes to nothing. Why do men want any of those things that are called political rights and privileges? Why do they, for instance, want to vote at elections for members of parliament? Oh! Because they shall then have an influence over the conduct of those members. And of what use is that? Oh! Then they will prevent the members from doing wrong.
Good government is known from bad government by this infallible test: that under the former the labouring people are well fed and well clothed, and under the latter, they are badly fed and badly clothed.
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