William Cobbett Quotes

You never know what you can do till you try.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Learning consists of ideas, and not of the noise that is made by the mouth.

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

Never esteem men on account of their riches or their station. Respect goodness, find it where you may.

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.

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"?

To be poor and independent is very nearly an impossibility.

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.

I defy you to agitate any fellow with a full stomach.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The power which money gives is that of brute force; it is the power of the bludgeon and the bayonet.

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.

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.

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.