William Cobbett Quotes

49 Sourced Quotes

Perhaps there are none more lazy, or more truly ignorant, than your everlasting readers.

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

William Cobbett
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 honoured by the name of speculation ; but which ought to be called Gambling.

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

William Cobbett
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.

William Cobbett
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.

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

William Cobbett
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.

William Cobbett
Nouns of number, or multitude, such as Mob, Parliament, Rabble, House of Commons, Regiment, Court of King's Bench, Den of Thieves, and the like.

William Cobbett
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.

William Cobbett
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.

William Cobbett
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.

William Cobbett
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.

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

William Cobbett
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.

William Cobbett
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.

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

William Cobbett
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.

William Cobbett
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.

William Cobbett
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.

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

William Cobbett
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.

William Cobbett
Norwich is a very fine city, and the castle, which stands in the middle of it, on a hill, is truly majestic.

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

William Cobbett
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.

William Cobbett
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.

William Cobbett
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.

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

William Cobbett
As to the power which money gives, it is that of brute force, it is the power of the bludgeon and the bayonet, and of the bribed press, tongue and pen.

William Cobbett
However roguish a man may be, he always loves to deal with an honest man.

William Cobbett