James Fenimore Cooper Quotes

96 Sourced Quotes

A monarchy is the most expensive of all forms of government, the regal state requiring a costly parade, and he who depends on his own power to rule, must strengthen that power by bribing the active and enterprising whom he cannot intimidate.

James Fenimore Cooper
The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms.

James Fenimore Cooper
Slavery is no more sinful, by the Christian code, than it is sinful to wear a whole coat, while another is in tatters, to eat a better meal than a neighbor, or otherwise to enjoy ease and plenty, while our fellow creatures are suffering and in want.

James Fenimore Cooper
Candor is a proof of both a just frame of mind, and of a good tone of breeding. It is a quality that belongs equally to the honest man and to the gentleman.

James Fenimore Cooper
It is a misfortune that necessity has induced men to accord greater license to this formidable engine, in order to obtain liberty, than can be borne with less important objects in view; for the press, like fire, is an excellent servant, but a terrible master.

James Fenimore Cooper
The very existence of government at all, infers inequality. The citizen who is preferred to office becomes the superior to those who are not, so long as he is the repository of power, and the child inherits the wealth of the parent as a controlling law of society.

James Fenimore Cooper
Party leads to vicious, corrupt and unprofitable legislation, for the sole purpose of defeating party.

James Fenimore Cooper
The tendency of democracies is, in all things, to mediocrity.

James Fenimore Cooper
It is a besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which masses of men exhibit their tyranny.

James Fenimore Cooper
Perfection is always found in maturity, whether it be in the animal or in the intellectual world. Reflection is the mother of wisdom, and wisdom the parent of success.

James Fenimore Cooper
Ignorance and superstition ever bear a close, and even a mathematical relation to each other.

James Fenimore Cooper
Liberty is not a matter of words, but a positive and important condition of society. Its greatest safeguard after placing its foundations in a popular base, is in the checks and balances imposed on the public servants.

James Fenimore Cooper
The affairs of life embrace a multitude of interests, and he who reasons in any one of them, without consulting the rest, is a visionary unsuited to control the business of the world.

James Fenimore Cooper
We can all perceive the difference between ourselves and our inferiors, but when it comes to a question of the difference between us and our superiors we fail to appreciate merits of which we have no proper conceptions.

James Fenimore Cooper
The minority of a country is never known to agree, except in its efforts to reduce and oppress the majority.

James Fenimore Cooper
No one, who is familiar with the bustle and activity of an American commercial town, would recognise, in the repose which now reigns in the ancient mart of Rhode Island, a place that, in its day, has been ranked amongst the most important ports along the whole line of our extended coast.

James Fenimore Cooper
Advice is not a gift, but a debt that the old owe to the young.

James Fenimore Cooper
Property is desirable as the ground work of moral independence, as a means of improving the faculties, and of doing good to others, and as the agent in all that distinguishes the civilized man from the savage.

James Fenimore Cooper
How easy it is for generous sentiments, high courtesy, and chivalrous courage to lose their influence beneath the chilling blight of selfishness, and to exhibit to the world a man who was great in all the minor attributes of character, but who was found wanting when it became necessary to prove how much principle is superior to policy.

James Fenimore Cooper
At no period of the naval history of the world, is it probable that Marines were more important than during the War of the Revolution,

James Fenimore Cooper
As our young master paced the terrace alone, that idea of the necessity of the Creator's being incomprehensible to the created, recurred to him. The hour that succeeded was probably the most important in Roswell Gardiners life. So intense were his feelings, so active the workings of his mind, that he was quite insensible to the intensity of the cold; and his body keeping equal motion with his thoughts, if one may so express it, his frame actually set at defiance a temperature that might otherwise have chilled it, warmly and carefully as it was clad.

James Fenimore Cooper
The sublimity connected with vastness, is familiar to every eye.

James Fenimore Cooper
A refined simplicity is the characteristic of all high bred deportment, in every country, and a considerate humanity should be the aim of all beneath it.

James Fenimore Cooper
The habit of seen the public rule, is gradually accustoming the American mind to an interference with private rights that is slowly undermining the individuality of the national character. There is getting to be so much public right, that private right is overshadowed and lost. A danger exists that the ends of liberty will be forgotten altogether in the means.

James Fenimore Cooper
Some changes of language are to be regretted, as they lead to false inferences, and society is always a loser by mistaking names for things.

James Fenimore Cooper
[The Great Prairies] A vast country, incapable of sustaining a dense population.

James Fenimore Cooper
Of all the sources of human pride, mere wealth is the basest and most vulgar-minded. Real gentlemen are almost invariably above this low feeling.

James Fenimore Cooper
Next to arms, eloquence offers the great avenue to popular favor, whether it be in civilized or savage life.

James Fenimore Cooper
Systems are to be appreciated by their general effects, and not by particular exceptions.

James Fenimore Cooper
They who have reasoned ignorantly, or who have aimed at effecting their personal ends by flattering the popular feeling, have boldly affirmed that 'one man is as good as another;' a maxim that is true in neither nature, revealed morals, nor political theory.

James Fenimore Cooper