William Cobbett Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

But I do not remember ever having seen a newspaper in the house; and, most certainly, that privation did not render us less industrious, happy, or free.

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.

It is by attempting to reach the top in a single leap that so much misery is produced in the world.

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.

Happiness, or misery, is in the mind. It is the mind that lives.

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.

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.

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 be poor and independent is very nearly an impossibility.

The Norfolk people are quick and smart in their motions and their speaking. Very neat and trim in all their farming concerns and very skilful. Their land is good, their roads are level, and the bottom of their soil is dry, to be sure; and these are great advantages; but they are diligent and make the most of everything.

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.

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.

You can tell a lot about a country which refers to the Royal Mint and the National Debt.

You never know what you can do till you try.

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.

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.

Men of integrity are generally pretty obstinate, in adhering to an opinion once adopted.

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.

Sit down to write what you have thought, and not to think about what you shall write.

WESTBURY, a nasty odious rotten-borough, a really rotten place.

DEAL is a most villainous place. It is full of filthy-looking people.Great desolationof abomination has beengoing on here.

It is not the greatness of a man's means that makes him independent, so much as the smallness of his wants.

He who writes badly thinks badly

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.

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.

Men fail much oftener from want of perseverance than from want of talent.

I cannot ... perceive any ground for hoping that any practical good would, while the funding system exists in its present extent, result from the adoption of any of those projects, which have professed to have in view what is called Parliamentary Reform ... when the funding system, from whatever cause, shall cease to operate upon civil and political liberty, there will be no need of projects for parliamentary reform. The parliament will, as far as shall be necessary, then reform itself.

The smallness of our desires may contribute reasonably to our wealth.

Having still in my recollection so many excellent men, to whose grandfathers, upon the same spots, my grandfather had yielded cheerful obedience and reverence, it is not without sincere sorrow that I have beheld many of the sons of these men driven from their fathers' mansions, or holding them as little better than tenants or stewards, while the swarms of Placemen, Pensioners, Contractors, and Nabobs ... have usurped a large part of the soil.

Without bread all is misery.

The town of GUILDFORD, which (taken with its environs) I, who have seen so many, many towns, think the prettiest, and, taken all together, the most agreeable and most happy-looking, that I ever saw in my life.

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"?

A full belly to the labourer was, in my opinion, the foundation of public morals and the only source of real public peace.

Please your eye and plague your heart.