James Fenimore Cooper Quotes

96 Sourced Quotes

In America, it is indispensable that every well wisher of true liberty should understand that acts of tyranny can only proceed from the publick. The publick, then, is to be watched, in this country, as, in other countries kings and aristocrats are to be watched.

James Fenimore Cooper
It is seldom men think of death in the pride of their health and strength.

James Fenimore Cooper
The listeners got some such insights into their past lives, as one gets into the darker parts of the woods, when a stray gleam of sunshine finds its way down to the roots of the trees.

James Fenimore Cooper
Apathy is the great requisite for the station; for woe betide the wretch who fancies any modicum of zeal.

James Fenimore Cooper
Death is appalling to those of the most iron nerves, when it comes quietly and in the stillness and solitude of night.

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

James Fenimore Cooper
No star seemed less than what science has taught us that it is.

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
The sight of a coward's blood can never make a warrior tremble.

James Fenimore Cooper
The earthquake had thrust upward a vast surface of the reef, completely altering the whole appearance of the shoal! In a word, nature had made another effort, and islands had been created, as it might be in the twinkling of an eye.

James Fenimore Cooper
The sun had not risen, but the vault of heaven was rich with the winning, softness that "brings and shuts the day," while the whole air was filled with the carols of birds, the hymns of the feathered tribe.

James Fenimore Cooper
It is better for a man to die at peace with himself than to live haunted by an evil conscience!

James Fenimore Cooper
Commerce is entitled to a complete and efficient protection in all its legal rights, but the moment it presumes to control a country, or to substitute its fluctuating expedients for the high principles of natural justice that ought to lie at the root of every political system, it should be frowned on, and rebuked.

James Fenimore Cooper
It's wisest always to be so clad that our friends need not ask us for our names.

James Fenimore Cooper
I do not pretend that all that white men do is properly Christianized...

James Fenimore Cooper
The vulgar charge that the tendency of democracies is to leveling, meaning to drag all down to the level of the lowest, is singularly untrue; its real tendency being to elevate the depressed to a condition not unworthy of their manhood.

James Fenimore Cooper
Superstition is a quality that seems indigenous to the ocean.

James Fenimore Cooper
On the whole, it [the ocean] is capricious, rather than malignant.

James Fenimore Cooper
A single glance at the map will make the reader acquainted with the position of the eastern coast of the island of Great Britain, as connected with the shores of the opposite continent.

James Fenimore Cooper
It is a governing principle of nature, that the agency which can produce most good, when perverted from its proper aim, is most productive of evil.

James Fenimore Cooper
When men struggle for the single life God has given them... even their own kind seem no more than the beasts of the wood.

James Fenimore Cooper
Whatever may be the changes produced by man, the eternal round of the seasons is unbroken.

James Fenimore Cooper
I will go upon the rock, boys, and look abroad for the savages," said Ishmael shortly after, advancing towards them with a mien which he intended should be conciliating, at the same time that it was authoritative. "If there is nothing to fear, we will go out on the plain; the day is too good to be lost in words, like women in the towns wrangling over their tea and sugared cakes.

James Fenimore Cooper
Equality, in a social sense, may be divided into that of condition and that of rights. Equality of condition is incompatible with civilization, and is found only to exist in those communities that are but slightly removed from the savage state. In practice, it can only mean a common misery.

James Fenimore Cooper
Those families, you know, are our upper crust—not upper ten thousand.

James Fenimore Cooper
One of the most melancholy consequences of this habit of deferring to other nations, and to other systems, is the fact that it causes us to undervalue the high blessings we so peculiarly enjoy; to render us ungrateful towards God, and to make us unjust to our fellow men, by throwing obstacles in their progress towards liberty.

James Fenimore Cooper
The old political saying, that "the people are their own worst enemies," while false as a governing maxim, contains some truth... It is, therefore, a public duty of the citizen to guard against all excesses of popular power, whether inflicted by mere opinion, or under the forms of law. In all his public acts, he should watch himself, as under a government of another sort he would watch his rulers; or as vigilantly as he watches the servants of the community at home ; for, though possessing the power in the last resort, it is not so absolutely an irresponsible power as it first seems, coming from God, and to be wielded on those convictions of right which God has implanted in our breasts, that we may know good from evil.

James Fenimore Cooper
We live in a world of transgressions and selfishness, and no pictures that represent us otherwise can be true; though happily for human nature, gleamings of that pure spirit in whose likeness man has been fashioned, are to be seen, relieving its deformities, and mitigating, if not excusing its crimes.

James Fenimore Cooper
We do not believe any more in the superior innocence and virtue of a rural population.

James Fenimore Cooper
The Americans … are almost ignorant of the art of music, one of the most elevating, innocent and refining of human tastes, whose influence on the habits and morals of a people is of the most beneficial tendency.

James Fenimore Cooper